“The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don t belong; it doesn t include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.”
“Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.”
“The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.”
“If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.”
“Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent. ”
“If you ve spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you ve probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It s supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It s the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that s not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can t tell if what they re creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It s an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they re being entertained. Of course, the reader isn t really sure, either. They just want to know when they re supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the form of funny, which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. ”
“One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. ”
“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there s a sense in which it doesn t matter that these people s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”
“If privacy had a gravestone it might read: Don t Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.”
“Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.”
“no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.”
“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
“A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.”
“ Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? ”
“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”
“Never having experienced inequality, therefore, the majority of straight white men will be absolutely oblivious to their own advantages – not because they must necessarily be insensitive, sexist, racist, homophobic or unaware of the principles of equality; but because they have been told, over and over again, that there is no inequality left for them – or anyone else – to experience – and everything they have experienced up to that point will only have proved them right. Let the impact of that sink in for a moment. By teaching children and teenagers that equality already exists, we are actively blinding the group that most benefits from inequality – straight white men – to the prospect that it doesn’t. Privilege to them feels indistinguishable from equality, because they’ve been raised to believe that this is how the world behaves for everyone. And because the majority of our popular culture is straight-white-male-dominated, stories that should be windows into empathy for other, less privileged experiences have instead become mirrors, reflecting back at them the one thing they already know: that their lives both are important and free from discrimination. And this hurts men. It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished. It hurts them by saying they will always be inferior parents and caregivers, that they must always be active and aggressive even when they long for passivity and quietude, that they must enjoy certain things like sports and beer and cars or else be deemed morally suspect. It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening , and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money. Blog post 4/12/2012: Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men”
“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”