Contrary to Authority: Marcus Aurelius II

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Marcus Aurelius II

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius has been a treasured companion at bath time; some have rubber ducks, some have Mozart and Bach, others have real, live dolls, but I get my with ancient philosophy and tsumego. Alas, I have finished Meditations, but I do have another quote:

"Socrates used to say: 'What do you want? To have souls of rational or irrational beings?'
'Rational.'
'What rational beings, sound or inferior?'
'Sound.'
'What don't you seek them?'
'Because we have them.'
'Why then do you fight and disagree?'"

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"Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life has been a drag. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."--May '68 graffiti

: Name: Tristen

A 1-Dan South African go player and activist on a mission to determine if the State is legitimate in terms of its ability to promote human flourishing. Drop me a line sometime (replace [at] with @): contrarytoauthority[at]gmail.com Copyleft, 2005-2006.

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"And yet simply from the fact that other men as misguided and as pitiful creatures as yourself have made you soldier, tzar, landowner, capitalist, priest, or general, you undertake to commit acts of violence obviously opposed to your reason and your heart, to base your existence on the misfortunes of others, and above all, instead of filling the one duty of your life, recognizing and professing the truth, you feign not to recognize it and disguise it from yourself and others. And what are the conditions in which you are doing this? You who may die any instant, you sign sentences of death, you declare war, you take part in it, you judge, you punish, you plunder the working people, you live luxuriously in the midst of the poor, and teach weak men who have confidence in you that this must be so, that the duty of men is to do this, and yet it may happen at the moment when you are acting thus that a bacterium or a bull may attack you and you will fall and die, losing forever the chance of repairing the harm you have done to others, and above all to yourself, in uselessly wasting a life which has been given you only once in eternity, without having accomplished the only thing you ought to have done."--Leo Tolstoy

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"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."--Eugene Debs

"Give me crack and anal sex//Take the only tree that's left//and stuff it up the hole//in your culture//Give me back the Berlin wall//give me Stalin and St. Paul//I've seen the future, brother: it is murder"--Leonard Cohen

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality...."--Che Guevara

"Well I grew up fast, I grew up hard//something was wrong from the very start//I was fighting everybody, I was fighting everything//but the only one that I hurt was me//I got society's blood running down my face//Somebody help me get outta this place//How could someone's bad luck last so long?//until I realized that I was wrong//I was wrong, self destruction's got me again/I was wrong, the only one that was wrong was me, I was wrong."--Social Distortion

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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Marcus Aurelius II

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