1
" Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.
(The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man. "
― Ayn Rand , Atlas Shrugged
6
" I love the way you feel inside me,” he said.
Ryder made a low, rumbling noise of contentment. “I love the way I feel inside you, too.”
“I love that you did this for me because you wanted to give me something special.” Luca started rocking back and forth on Ryder’s cock. “I love that you’ve never done it for anyone else.”
Ryder’s brow creased. “Luca…”
Luca put his hand over Ryder’s mouth, a domineering gesture that silenced Ryder instantly. He didn’t know where the words were coming from, just that they were clawing at his throat, demanding to get out.
“I love the way you treat me,” he said. “I love that you’re so much stronger than me but you never make me feel weak. I love that you take care of me without implying that I can’t take care of myself. I love that you let me take control but always call me on my bullshit.”
Luca had to pause for a moment; the pleasure of their slow, rhythmic fucking was making it difficult for him to gather his thoughts. Ryder waited, eyes watchful.
“I love that you’re always worried about doing the right thing, even when nobody else is.” Certain that Ryder wouldn’t interrupt now, Luca let go of his mouth and braced his hands on Ryder’s chest. He bounced shallowly on Ryder’s cock, soaking up his size, his strength, his steady, reassuring presence. “I love that I can trust you, and I love that I can rely on you, and – and I love you, Ryder, I do, I love you – ”
Because he did, of course he did. It was crazy to pretend that he didn’t. He might be damning them both, but he couldn’t hide from this any longer, couldn’t let Ryder go on thinking he wasn’t head-over-heels in love with him. "
― , Close Protection
7
" The job of the politician is to speak for all people; not just for parties with vested interests, or organisations with the biggest wallets. The first people a politician should protect are those that cannot protect themselves: Those weakest and most vulnerable among us. This is, to most of us, something that seems to be an obvious statement of fact, and that may be so, but it’s also a forgotten fact. Now, today, the opposite is true. It should shame us all. It shames me. The very fact that the most poor and the most vulnerable in our society are those that are victimised and stamped upon, whereas the most wealthy and the most influential are making more profits and acquiring more assets and wealth than ever before in history, is a damning indictment of what our society has become "
― Paul Howsley , The Year of the Badgers
8
" Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to. "
11
" It’s no secret that we all live within a damning illusion called denial. We are doomed by our own far-reaching imaginations and beliefs that extend into a glorified version of eternity. How are we to live sanely on the earth, with our heads in the clouds, when we are so far from being giants? How are we to claim higher ideals, when God is absent from the conversations in our minds?
There can be no going back, once we’ve believed in perfection. We are slain by the stories we were taught as children, stories about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and a God who cares.
We pass these heirlooms to our children with the same fervor with which they were delivered, never allowing ourselves to doubt their authenticity or value.
I wondered what the view held outside the proverbial slaughterhouse. For a spiritually awakened person, a good God seems the only reasonable answer. If there’s no eternal good, then what would be the use of life?
Man lays the tracks of good and evil before the train of his evolution, moving onward into places he barely understands "
― Christopher Hawke
12
" I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze.
There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me.
It's the beautiful thing about youth.
There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get. "
― Blake Crouch , Dark Matter
18
" I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs. "
― Richard Wright , Black Boy
