Your Quote of the Day

Janis Ian
"Who knows why we were taught to fear the witches, and not those who burned them alive."
* Please keep in mind that men were also burned as witches. It's not only about "the patriarchy" - that's too simple an answer.
Also, traditionally witches were not burned; they were hanged. I'm sure that made them feel better about it...

"Please keep in mind that men were also burned as witches. It's not only about "the patriarchy" - that's too simple an answer."

Patriarchy is not simply male against female. It's the mind dominating nature versus a balance of mind and nature, which is the matriarchy.

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
--Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”
― Louisa May Alcott

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." ~ Samuel Johnson

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
--E.O. Wilson

"You raise up your fist and you learn to resist and you say 'I will not disappear'". From the song "Resist". Janis Ian

"We are just viruses with shoes."
- Bill Hicks

You have not failed until you quit trying.
Gordon B. Hinckley

“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays (1942)

"We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding."--Mark Strand

“We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.”
― Henry Miller

"After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." -Ann Richards 1988
* actual source: Ginger Rogers herself credited the quote to a 1982 cartoon by Bob Thaves.

“People always said that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
- Rosa Parks

"Tennessee loved to praise things by labeling them as sentimental, and I kept telling him that I felt this was a pejorative term. He was horrified. I then asked him to explain his own definition of sentimental. He explained that sentiment was realizing, when a female character walked on stage, what her mother told her when she was a young girl leaving the house; when a character walks on stage and you suddenly recall the perfume your mother wore or the scent of your father's tobacco; when a look on a character's face reminded you of the little boy who was brutalized by the school bully, and how he looked around for help or a sympathetic face. Sentiment to Tennessee was really a profound memory, and from that time on, I was proud to call myself sentimental." Elia Kazan on the sentimental nature of Tennessee Williams/1994

"Fascism is an ideology that is centered on power, loyalty, and fear of the other."
--Jason Stanley

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. ~Ernest Hemingway
(Book: A Farewell to Arms https://amzn.to/3gvQs0U)

Happy birthday to Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot (1819-1880), the English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. 👇
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."
"It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view."
"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear."

"And you know foolishly, or perhaps naively, I always thought there was this baseline, a baseline of patriotism below which no elected officials would ever sink. How wrong I was."
--Glenn Kirchner