(Source: maudit)

"Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I‘ve been there for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting."

"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense."

"

Stop degrading the act of sex by calling it ‘opening your legs.’

I’m so sick of women being degraded all the time. Because women just, you know, lay back and ‘spread their legs’ and let men do whatever they want. They don’t take any active role in the actual sex act or enjoy it. They are just objects that lay there with their legs open. Then they are stupid because through poor judgement or mishap, they became pregnant. The man is never blamed or shamed or degraded for having sex. There are no phrases used to degrade the act of a man participating in a sexual act, at least not a heterosexual one.

I swear if I could punch people in the face for saying ‘they shouldn’t have spread their legs’ I would. I don’t even care if they are someone in my family or my friends. That is how fucking pissed I get when people say hateful shit like that about women.

No issue is black and white. Women have abortions for many reasons. Shit happens. The fetus ends up being deformed and would not live; the woman just ended a previously stable relationship; the woman or couple has children already and cannot afford any more at the moment; The couple may have used birth control but it failed; the woman just found out she has a serious illness and will not be able to carry a pregnancy to term; the woman was raped, etc.

So fuck you and your hatred of women. Negativity about sex is disgusting and harmful.

"

"I’m not saying that we are all criminals for participating in file sharing. It is my hope that content distributors will start to realize why people pirate. That it isn’t just because it is free. It’s also goddamned convenient. They need to accept that times have changed. We don’t want to buy their DVDs. We don’t want overpriced cable bundles with 40 channels we will never watch. Photoshop should not cost 700 goddamn dollars. We want safe, reliable content available for download instantly and priced within reason. By not providing this, distributors are almost begging people to steal their shit."

"Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

"When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."

"There are many reasons that jokes can be considered offensive, but one of the underlying principles is that someone has decided to use your lived experience as fodder for a cheap laugh. Rape jokes make a farce of the brutal trauma that many women have had to suffer through and can potentially trigger memories of the event. Sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic, and bigoted jokes serve only to belittle and propagate the indignities, inequalities, and violence that minorities suffer through on a daily basis under the kyriarchy. When a joke-teller attempts a kyriarchy-approved offensive joke, not only are they asking for the butt of their joke to play along in their humiliation, but it’s also implicitly asking them to confirm for the joke-teller that all those nasty stereotypes are true, that the kyriarchy is right to keep up its oppressive hierarchy because these minorities are just so inherently less than. It’s like asking a rape survivor to agree that they were totally asking for it or asking a woman to say that of course she should be paid less than a man for the same work because her silly lady brain can only handle baby-making. That is why these jokes can be so damn offensive, the joke-teller is asking their audience to be complicit in their own oppression."

"We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it."

"Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still."

(via heroijuana)