Sunday, April 5, 2015 – Sufficient Outrage
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash. Your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them. ~ William Faulkner
What you need is sustained outrage… there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority. ~ Molly Ivins
I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex. ~ Bertrand Russell
On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution. ~ Paul Bloom
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. ~ H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly. ~ Victor Hugo
Famously, there’s not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It’s not progressing toward anything, it’s a statement of outrage, however brilliant. ~ Alan Moore
The way towards simplicity is through outrage. ~ William Golding, Darkness Visible
The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you’re asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences. ~ Ron Suskind
Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it. ~ Karl Kraus
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood – we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we. ~ Jean Rostand
One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage. ~ David Simon
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. ~ R. D. Laing
Well, when I was a kid, if my father was witnessing something that he thought was particularly outrageous or he was looking at some sort of a question that he thought lacked proper definition, he would say, Well, at least Jesse James had the honor to wear a mask. ~ Richard Neal
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought. ~ Samuel Butler
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. ~ Archibald MacLeish
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. ~ Salman Rushdie
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. ~ E. M. Forster
We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless. ~ J. William Fulbright
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. ~ Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel
Whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood. ~ William Allen White
Sooner barbarity than boredom. ~ Theophile Gautier
The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance. ~ Pierre Schaeffer
If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity. ~ Nelson DeMille
I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances. ~ Simone Weil
Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~ Edmond de Goncourt
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it’s all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It’s the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. ~ Bertolt Brecht
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. ~ Edward Bellamy
You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. ~ John Buchan
First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
Just Above Sunset 