Really

I could tell you
If I wanted to,
What makes me
What I am.

But I don't
Really want to -
And you don't
Give a damn.
--Langston Hughes

Reason

The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades.
--Max Horkheimer (1941)

Friendship

If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
--Michel de Montaigne

Culture

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.
--Umberto Eco

Forgiven

To deny her forgiveness was to act arrogantly, as if I had never needed to be forgiven, as if I would not need to be forgiven countless times in the future.
--Suzanne Clothier

Learn

I've been thinking about bad decisions and how good decisions grow out of them. Climbing the radio tower was dumb. The borrowed motorcycle, the drummer's sister, the mysterious powder, the third trip to the buffet. All terrible ideas. My question is, how do cautious people ever learn anything?
--Dave Maleckar

To Burn

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
--Walter Pater

Accept

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among others.
--George Orwell (1940)

Fabricate

The most significant quality of totalitarian thinkers is an extreme contempt for facts, for, in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.
--Hannah Arendt

Screens

If you'd rather browse your phone than talk with the people you are dining with, you are dining with the wrong people. Must be awful to never be where you want to be, always longingly "peeking" at the "window."
--BluBlu Musica

Effort

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all.
--Quentin Crisp

Trust

Trust is the oil in the engine of capitalism; without it the engine seizes up. Confidence is like the gasoline; without it the machine won't move.
--Richard L. Peterson

Creepy

Most people would consider an animatronic sex doll creepy. But isn't that pretty much what Facebook is? It's a mechanism for replacing real human interaction with low effort, low risk interaction at a distance.
--Zarko Slate

Kind

Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself.
--Rabbi Harold Kushner

Contours

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
--Ernest Hemingway

Reason

Reason has always existed, but not always in reasonable form.
--Karl Marx

Fluid

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
--Mark Twain

Tribal vs Ideological

Some of us are purely tribal--our loyalty is to our family, posse, gang, political party, identity group, no matter what. That's been part of the gangster ethos of the Trump Administration. Others among us are ideological: our primary loyalty is to values and truth, and we will repudiate or tell harsh truths about even people we love if they violate those values. The tribalists will repudiate values to stay with the gang. It's a way to understand how good Republicans are at cohesiveness and how bad Democrats can be, and why that is sometimes a good thing.
--Rebecca Solnit

Price

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
--Eldridge Cleaver

Tell You

Listen. If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
--Neil Gaiman

Aging

The history of aging appears to follow this rule: the fewer old people there are, the more esteemed they will be.
--Jill Lepore