Ross Cullens > Ross's Quotes

“The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.”
― Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I define power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed.”
― Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart

“We are fighting for a different world, and we are building new muscles to do so.”
― Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart

“Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?”
― Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

“Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.”
― Ayn Rand

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher

“This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.”
― Toni Morrison

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
― James Baldwin

“slavemasters and kidnappers had indeed done their work well. They had so incorporated their iniquities with the Christian religion that when you doubted their racism you were contradicting the Bible and flying in the face of God Almighty.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“In order to be successful in any undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause. In proportion as one loses himself in this way, in the same degree does he get the highest happiness out of his work.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too?”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Something about how to let folks rest in peace, especially when their peace is different from mine. Louder than mine.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Healing cannot come out of punishment because punishment’s only purpose is to create more harm.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives.
You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.”
― Thisuri Wanniarachchi, COLOMBO STREETS

“Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Everybody complain about their appearance and nobody about their brains.”
― Faina Ranevskaya

“Aging is tedious, but it is the only way to live long.”
― Faina Ranevskaya

“The pessimist says, ‘It can’t get any worse!’ And the optimist replies, ‘Oh yes it can!”
― Madeleine Urban, Fish & Chips

“Falling in love or just plain falling : they were both terrifying at any speed”
― Abigail Roux, Fish & Chips

“Education is what you get from reading the small print; experience is
what you get from not reading it.”
― Common Sense

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition.”
― Woody Allen

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.”
― Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

“We cannot really experience something while we are thinking, not even the act of thinking.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana