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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“When people take the short lifetime of an animal, filled with suffering and abuse, rape and mutilation, humiliation and commodification, and reduce all that down to "meat", this is such an incredibly selfish attitude, filled with arrogance and apathy towards the animal in question. You'll often hear such people cry "freedom of choice", while at the same time depriving these animals of any "freedom" throughout the entirety of their lives. Beings who are given zero "choice" in the matter. At the merciless hands of consumer demand, they will have their tails docked, their ears clipped, their beaks cut off, their testicles twisted and pulled off, searing hot irons pushed into the sides of their bodies(all without anaesthetics). They'll be sexually violated, have their babies stolen, their movements restricted, forced to live lives of anguish, despair and torment. They'll suffer long, arduous journeys, In cramped conditions, with nothing to drink or eat, until finally they are prodded, kicked and shocked along a production line that ends in,bolts to their heads (often ineffective), and knives to their throat, scalding water or even the gas chamber. All so that these people can gratify themselves with the fleeting, perverse pleasure of their secretions (milk and eggs) or the slayed animal's butchered fried flesh. The same people will cry out for "respect", while simultaneously fully disrespecting and disregarding the lives of others that they will do their utmost to downplay and ignore.”

“When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.”

“When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.”

“When people talk about wanting to have children someday, what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff.”

“When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.”

“When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?”

“When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.”