Becoming a Vegan

How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based...the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.

Peter Singer
Becoming a Vegan

An age of poverty.

It is still her use
To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,
To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow
An age of poverty.

William Shakespeare,
The Merchant of Venice 

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

Milan Kundera

Icy Ladder

So, life is like, again, an icy ladder. So, when you climb up, you have to be really, really energetic or you won’t be able to climb up ‘cause you slip and fall down.

Stanislav Pozdniakov

Plan 9 from Outer Space

For a time we tried to contact them by radio but no response. Then they attacked a town, a small town I'll admit, but nevertheless a town of people, people who died.

Col. Edwards

Two sides

"There are two sides to reconciliation; the law aspect and the moral values. Unless there is improvement for both, changes will not come by easily."

Taito Waradi

The function of music

"Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal."

Iannis Xenakis

Skeletor

Stay where you are, He-Man! One more move and your friends will not live to see another day! I give you a choice. Return with me to Eternia as my slave and save their despicable lives, or perish with them on this primitive and tasteless planet. Surrender your sword!

Sketelor
Masters of the Universe

Life, Liberty, Property

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

 Allan Bloom

Daleks

This is your Emperor, speaking! There is Danger here! DO NOT FIGHT IN HERE! I SAID DO NOT FIGHT IN HERE! OBEY ME! YOUR EMPEROR! YOU WILL OBEY ME!!!! OBEY!!!! OBEY!!!! YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED! ALL EXTERMINATED!!!!

 Dalek Emperor
Dr Who

Idea of compassion

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Thomas Merton

Be Aware

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Aldous Huxley
In The Doors of Perception