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"A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations."
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"Come forward as servants of Islam, organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody."
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"If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system. That's much more powerful than rebelling outside the system."
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"The feeling of that moment defined earthly rapture for James Ed. Before his state of mind could enjoy a full minute of the ultimate feeling, the six-year-old memory intervened. Goddamn that memory! he thought."
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"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
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"To reap a return in ten years, plant trees. To reap a return in 100, cultivate the people."
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"Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life..."
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"Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance."
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"Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men. Always trust your heart. If the Creator stood before a million men with the light of a million lamps, only a few would truly see him because truth is already alive in their hearts. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have Truth in his heart, will always be blind to her."
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"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr."
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"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining punishment and being supposed to punish hurts it, arouses fear in it. Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?Punishing itself is terrible. With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence."
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"The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called doublethink, and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call dissociation. It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . ."
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"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
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"I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things."
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"We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules."
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"If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead."
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"I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like."
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"Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public."
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"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."
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"Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder."
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