
“Stagnation, weakness and decadence ... beautiful custom ... pretext that paralyzes our activity.”
Bourguiba on Ramadan's effect on Tunisia:
“Stagnation, weakness and decadence ... beautiful custom ... pretext that paralyzes our activity.”
Bourguiba on Ramadan's effect on Tunisia:
“It's our faith that activates the power of God.”
Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
“To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing?”
Cassandra (1860)
Context: To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.
Quarterly Review, 120, 1866, p. 273
1860s
Twitter tweet (31 May 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986617191<!-- also (1 June 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986630272 -->
Context: The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
“everyone in our school has afterschool activities. mine is going home.”
Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
"Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts (1969) http://fair-use.org/ellen-willis/women-and-the-myth-of-consumerism
Context: Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?
Section VI: “Let There Be Light”, p. 36 (Note: different pagination from other references here) http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1497285&pageno=36
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)