Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Want any of this stuff? Jordan?. . . Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No. . . I just remembered that today's my birthday. " I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
There is no shame in scars, Ismae.
It's the opposite of that. Engineers in lab coats have created a musical experience that is so crisp and clean, it can literally improve your hearing.
I define myself by everything that I love, everything I can create, everything that I can imagine.