Adam > Adam's Quotes

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
― Octavio Paz

“The more we love someone, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that true love shows itself.”
― Molière

“Write about what you're afraid of.”
― Donald Barthelme

“I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.”
― Voltairine de Cleyre

“Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

“If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as treatment rather than as social vengeance.”
― Daniel Guérin, Anarchism

“The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend

“Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method

“To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”

This invisibility is political.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Privilege: A Reader

“Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in.”
― Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

“Feminism expects a man to be ethical, emotionally present, and accountable to his values in his actions with women — as well as with other men. Feminism loves men enough to expect them to act more honorably and actually believes them capable of doing so.”
― Michael Kimmel

“The development of productive technologies offered western society a choice: to have more leisure time, or to increase the production and consumption of consumer goods. Capitalism took us down the latter path, and the Utopian dream of ease and leisure for all was buried under a mountain of commodities. [ch.three]”
― David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work

“One of the most pressing questions faced by capitalist societies now, at the pinnacle of their productive capacities, is the question of what should be done with the time being saved by these gains in productivity. What meaning and content will we, as a society, choose to give this new-found free-time?
Will we use it to enhance our lives outside work, nourish our relationships and pursue our own self-development, or will economic rationality dictate that we spend just as much time and energy on work as we did before? [ch.one]”
― David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
― Eugene Debs

“I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world.”
― Eugene Debs, Writings of Eugene V. Debs

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”
― Eugene V Debs

“A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs

“As long as he owns your tools he owns your job, and if he owns your job he is the master of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You are subject to his interest and to his will. He decides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he decides whether you shall live or die. And in that humiliating position any one who tries to persuade you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting your intelligence.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.”
― Joseph Pulitzer