s > s's Quotes

“David [Bowie] quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ and I loudly tell him, ‘You know, I’ve had SO LITTLE sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate-what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.”
― Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

“I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naïve… I want woman to look stronger… I don’t like women to be taken advantage of… I don’t like men whistling at women in the street. I think they deserve more respect. I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I’ve seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband. I know what misogyny is… I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”
― Alexander McQueen

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“casual acceptance of—even commitment to—human deprivation, to unemployment, inflation, and disastrously reduced living standards. This is even seen as essential therapy: out of the experience of unemployment and hunger will come a new and revitalized work ethic, a working force eager for the discipline of free enterprise.”
― Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.”
― Rick Perlstein

“We must accept our pain
Change what we can
and laugh at the rest”
― Camille Paglia

“Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman," by which he meant that those at the top of the heap use intellectuals as a scapegoat to distract people from the societal inequities that actually affect their lives: those of wealth and power. Intellectuals are posited as both sinister and powerful, conspiratorially undermining the values of ordinary people.”
― Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

“Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

“Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.”
― Noam Chomsky

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.”
― David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be
at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,
but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.
It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.”
― Gore Vidal

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
― Gore Vidal