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Quote by Charloote McConaghy

“GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO “The world was a different place, once,” Niall says into the microphone. “Once there were creatures in the sea so miraculous they seemed straight out of fantasy. There were things that loped across plains or slithered through tall grass, things that leaped from the boughs of trees, which were plentiful, too. Once there were glorious winged beasts that roamed the sky-world, and now they are going.” He stops and looks for my face in the lecture hall. “They aren’t going,” he corrects himself. “They are being violently and indiscriminately slaughtered by our indifference. It has been decided by our leaders that economic growth is more important. That the extinction crisis is an acceptable trade for their greed.” He said it’s hard, sometimes, to finish. The bile rises in his throat and he could break the lectern beneath his hands, overcome with a profound sense of loathing for what we are, all of us, and the poison of our species. He called himself a hypocrite for always talking, never doing, and he said he hates himself as much as anyone, he’s as much a perpetrator, a consumer living in wealth and privilege and wanting more and more and more.”

Quote by Charloote McConaghy

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Charloote McConaghy

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“If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions? Faced with so disquieting an alternative, we are always tempted to minimize the seriousness of the problem, to argue that those who worry about doomsday’s are alarmists; to hold that fundamental changes in our institutions are impractical or contrary to ‘human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. But then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.”

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence ... ' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' ... The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.”