Jane Levan

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Andrea Dworkin
“Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.”
Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”
Fred Hampton

John Bagot Glubb
“The first direction in which wealth injures the civilization is a moral one…The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash…The Arab moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains…[that students] no longer attend college to acquire learning and virtue, but to obtain those qualifications which will enable them to grow rich.”
John Bagot Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival

Robert A. Heinlein
“The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just. Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing—and you don’t have to go home in the cold. But it’s lonely.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Robert M. Sapolsky
“It is far from guaranteed that an empathic state leads to a compassionate act. One reason for this is captured superbly by the essayist Leslie Jamison: [Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.46 In such a situation, saying “I feel your pain,” becomes a New Age equivalent of the unhelpful bureaucrat saying, “Look, I sympathize with your situation, but …” The former is so detached from action that it doesn’t even require the “but” as a bridge to the “there’s nothing I can/will do.” Having your pain validated is swell; having it alleviated is better.”
Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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