• Quare ergo liberalibus studiis filios erudimus? Non quia virtutem dare possunt, sed quia animum ad accipiendam virtutem praeparant.
    ≪Why do we train our children in the liberal arts? It is not because these studies can grant someone virtue, but because they prepare the soul for accepting it.≫
    – Seneca, Moral Epistles 88.20

  • Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
    ≪Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.≫
    – Horace, Epistles II: 156-157

  • Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.
    – Ulrike Meinhof, journalist and militant

  • Power tells a story about itself and those it subjugates; radical social change will require less a critique of that story than a disruption of its telling.
    –Steven Gregory, Time to Make the Doughnuts: On the Politics of Subjugation in the “Inner City”. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 17(1):41-55, 1994

  • If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
    – Lord Byron

  • Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
    – Benjamin Franklin, statesman

  • The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
    – Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer

  • Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? Some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise, perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless.
    – Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)

  • Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
    – African proverb

  • The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
    – H. L. Mencken

  • If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
    – Charles Bukowski

  • The dead do not speak and the living speak only for themselves.
    – me