William S. Burroughs // "The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."
J.K. Rowling // "Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course... many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces...brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy... Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."
James Baldwin // "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction."
Haruki Murakami // "We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world."
Jean Cocteau // "I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead."
Bob Dylan // "When I watch the news, I realize that the world is run by those that never listen to music."
Simone de Beauvoir // "All day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation."
Sophia Loren // "I was not interested in what I could bring to myself...but in what I could bring out of myself."
Stephen Hawking // "We are only the temporary custodians of the particles which we are made of. They will go on to lead a future existence in the enormous universe that made them."
Stephen Hawking // "Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free."
Stephen Hawking // "However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope."
Gordon Parks // "I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun...but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful."