why am i still here? @surpheit - Tumblr Blog

“One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.”

— Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne

“I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”

— Emma Goldman, “Marriage”, The Firebrand, 18 July 1897

philosophybits

“The greatest fruit of self-reliance is freedom.”

— Epicurus, Vatican Sayings

philosophybits

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

philosophybits

“What characterizes the free spirit is not that his opinions are the more correct but that he has liberated himself from tradition, whether the outcome has been successful or a failure.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 225

philosophybits

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

philosophybits

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

— Frederick Douglass, “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (1857)”

philosophybits

“A young man wills himself free. He wills that there be being. This spontaneous liberality which casts him ardently into the world can ally itself to what is commonly called egoism. Often the young man perceives only that aspect of his relationship to others whereby others appear as enemies. […] At every moment others are stealing the whole world away from me. The first movement is to hate them. But this hatred is naive, and the desire immediately struggles against itself. If I were really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. […] If he is reasonable, the young man immediately understands that by taking the world away from me, others also give it to me, since a thing is given to me only by the movement which snatches it from me. To will that there be being is also to will that there be men by and for whom the world is endowed with human significations. One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects. To make being “be” is to communicate with others by means of being.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity