"To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there." ~ Kofi Annan
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"The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; It is this". ~ Chinua Achebe
Some people will do also anything to make a point - even if it makes themselves look stupid doing it, and the point itself is so trivial and insignificant it becomes incomprehensible, and then ... invisible.
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"I looked different with this huge Afro and hippy clothes, but I thought, if they want to stare well here I am. I was raised as an individual not as a black person." ~ Marcia Hines
"There IS such a thing as constructive criticism, agreeing to disagree, having a difference of opinion, etc. These are all healthy and I don't really see the problem. If two people are having a discussion on a topic and they have varying views, so be it! What sense does it make to attack the other person for not agreeing with you? It is the first attack that leads to others. Then the cycle becomes endless.
Also, I've seen a pattern with some members not giving others a 'chance' or a fresh start with every thread. They take remnants of old topics with them, presuming that other members will forever and ever hold the same opinion.
That's why so many of the threads in 'Issues' become so alike. The topic itself is forgotten because everyone is so caught up in the PEOPLE speaking, instead of what is being SPOKEN.
When it all boils down to it, an opinion in person's mind is their truth. My truth may be different than yours...and in the end, we may both be wrong, who knows? But this site is deteriorating because there is an obstinence and yes, an ignorance that refuses to budge with some members."
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882)
Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease. ~ Karel Capek
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. ~ Octavia Butler
[excerpt of the poem] Resignation by Nikki Giovanni
I love you ....
because winters flow into spring and the air clears after a storm because only my love for you despite the charms of gravity keeps me from falling off the Earth into another dimension ...
"You keep waiting for it to get better, but then you see another picture of a dead boy in the newspaper or someone else has gone missing for fifteen to life and you get really tired. You're tired of being a problem; you're tired of loving a country that doesn't love you or hating the place you call home. It's the kind of weariness old folks say you can feel in your bones.
We didn't mention the hardest things. No one said what it has done to us or disclosed the terrible things we do to one another. It would be difficult to explain [in Ghana] the gangbangers, drive-by shootings, homicide tolls, and missing fathers. Nor did we share the best things, like the way a song born in the cotton and cane fields became something wonderous on the lips of a trumpet player in New Orleans, or something able to cut your heart in two even when the words were as silly as what a little moonlight can do, or a rant about a distant lover, or a chant to bring Babylon down in the mouth of a trench town boy; or the raw-edged beauty that grew between the cracks of everything that was wrong in the urban gulag; or the miracle that we were still here." - Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in 'contact' with aliens. I am invited to ask them anything. And over the years I've prepared a little list of questions. The aliens are very advanced remember. So I ask things like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'. I write out the simple theorem equation with the exponents. It's a simulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would be recognised as such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in '10 Questions to Ask an Alien'. - Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World", p.95
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
