For me it was these.
“A focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius”
“Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter”
These two quotes really helped get my @** in gear.
“The first thing that jumps to your mind isn’t always what you truly think. Sometimes, it’s just what you’ve been trained to think. What matters, is what you do next”
I grew up in a really racist, queerphobic environment, and that comment really helped me by letting me give myself space to undo the bigoted indoctrination I had been taught, without getting trapped in guilt and self disgust whenever one of the racist or bigoted things I was raised with jumped in to my mind.
It let me recognise the bigoted thought as something I was trained to think, rather than being what I actually believe, and by recognising it, I could disempower the thought, and start to unlearn it
That’s a powerful thought.
Conditioning significantly influences our psyche.
These thoughts that are the result of conditioning are like knee jerk reactions.
Our brain is designed to conserve energy so it actually prioritises conditioned knee jerk reactions rather than introspective thoughts.
One needs significant amount of training to bypass this process.
“Everyone you know is facing a battle you know nothing about. Be kind always.”
That’s why whenever someone cuts me off in traffic, I say, “wow, that guy really must have to poop.”
Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes.
a tumblr meme about replacing self deprecating humor with over the top self belief humor.
not even kidding, was doomscrolling, this jumped into my feed and burnt itself into my brain and 4 years of doing precisely that later, i’m better than ever and it’s also just a way to break the ice sometimes.
when you don’t know something, saying shit like “despite my infinite wisdom, this eludes me” instead of “sorry i just dont know”
just stuff that stands out, gets a chuckle off of people, but is so obviously exaggerated that people know you don’t actually believe that you are infinitely wise.
and the greatest thing is that after a while you also incorporate these phrases when talking about/to others, so when you need help or something, you ask for their infinite wisdom.
(sry for the late answer im not used to getting interactions on social media lol)
“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”
-Stephen Jay Gould
Yeah just imagine if Isaac Newton was born as a sl***e rather than a rich estate owner. We would still be stuck in the dark ages.
Well not really. That is great man theory bs.
Newton did not “invent” gravity, it is an immutable law of the universe, no more did Marx “invent” socialism or the labor theory of value.
In both cases they observed actions and reactions that were testable and quantifiable and in both cases they were not the only ones to reach the same conclusions.
If anything the Gould quote is saying the opposite. That having so many people confined and coerced into such labors for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for a single individual, we are robbing ourselves of many great minds.
We’re in the process of declaring some words unsayable in order to massively amplify their power as offensive slurs. It’s going great so far, though sl**e still has some distance to go.
