Teddy Harp > Teddy's Quotes

“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
― Kofi Annan

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“Homophobia is the ignorant and arrogant assumption that copulation and reproduction is all there is to a relationship.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda

“We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
― Fred Hampton, I Am A Revolutionary: Fred Hampton Speaks

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them”
― Elie Wiesel

“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
― David Benatar , Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“It is impossible to bring a child into this world for its own sake.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Hep is a very dangerous disease that can cause a number of permanent conditions, including death, which is extremely permanent.”
― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

“...they cursed us - not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us - good, substantial curses.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“You’re a virgin. Hell’s fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness be merciful, you’re a virgin.” Still clutching the coat, she eyed him warily. “There’s no reason to get hysterical. It’s not contagious.” Jared”
― Anne Bishop, The Invisible Ring

“Parenthood is some people’s subconscious revenge for having been brought into existence without their consent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The bigger the family, the bigger the number of corpses it owes life.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Life keeps on making the terrible mistake of making impatient people capable of making children.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Human life grows cheaper with every mewling, puking infant that is born. Any form of birth control, no matter how unjust or extreme, is preferable to that tyranny exercised so criminally now by those who, in their filth, stupidity, rut and obnoxious lust, blindly and selfishly birth endlessly forth their disgusting progeny in chaotic, cancerous growth, shoving and forcing the guilty in with the innocent in this already over-stuffed planetary rat-box of accelerating madness and asphyxiation.”
― E.E. Rehmus

“Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished—your body, family, friends, country, what you’re doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over—in twenty four hours is death.

Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday’s, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in your last moments? No, worse: it is dead flesh. You want to enjoy the sun, air, light, sky? Enjoy?! The sun is a rotten orange, the light extinguished, the air suffocating. The sky is a low, oppressive arc. . . .No, everything is closed and dark now. But the sun shines, the air is pure, everything is like before, and yet you speak like a man buried alive, describing his tomb. And persuasion? You are not even persuaded of the sunlight; you cannot move a finger, cannot remain standing. The god who kept you standing,made your day clear and your food sweet, gave you family, country, paradise—he betrays you now and abandons you because the thread of your philopsychia is broken.

The meaning of things, the taste of the world, is only for continuation’s sake. Being born is nothing but wanting to go on on: men live in order to live, in order not to die. Their persuasion is the fear of death. Being born is nothing but fearing death, so that, if death becomes certain in a certain future, they are already dead in the present. All that they do and say with fixed persuasion, a clear purpose, and evident reason is nothing but fear of death– ‘indeed, believing one is wise without being wise is nothing but fearing death.”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“There is a correlation between how many years we will live and how many loved ones we will bury.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A positive attitude is often way more important than education, money, and experience.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Being a person is not nearly as overrated as having played a part in the initiation of the process that has led to the being of a person.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Expectation is a very powerful creative force.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar

“The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.”
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star