Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

George Carlin (via alfsaga)

Having a low opinion of yourself is not modesty. It’s self-destruction.

The first issue there is the idea that black girls choose not to aspire to ivy league educations. First, black women and girls are among some of the most aspirational groups in this country. Despite steep structural disadvantages data shows that black girls in high school disproportionately aspire to college and beyond. We see higher college attendance rates among black women than men even when they are more likely to be single parents, poor, and/or employed. To borrow from Mr. Beyonce, black girls got 99 problems but aspiration ain’t one.

Sometimes you wake up.
Sometimes the fall kills you.
And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.

Perfectly respectable Victorian women wrote to each other in terms such as these: ‘I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.’ They recorded the ‘furnace blast’ of their ‘passionate attachments’ to each other… They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights…

…Today if a woman died and her son or husband found such diaries or letters in her effects, he would probably destroy them in rage or humiliation. In the nineteenth century, these sentiments were so respectable that surviving relatives often published them in elegies….

[In the 1920s] people’s interpretation of physical contact became extraordinarily ‘privatized and sexualized,’ so that all types of touching, kissing, and holding were seen as sexual foreplay rather than accepted as ordinary means of communication that carried different meanings in different contexts… It is not that homosexuality was acceptable before; but now a wider range of behavior opened a person up to being branded as a homosexual… The romantic friendships that had existed among many unmarried men in the nineteenth century were no longer compatible with heterosexual identity.

Stephanie Coontz (via sylvia-psychoplath)

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

Gay marriage legalized on the same day as marijuana makes perfect biblical sense. Leviticus 20:13: ‘A man who lays with another man should be stoned.’
Our interpretation has just been wrong for all these years” — George Takei

LGBTQ* Humor and Quotes (via knowhomo)

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer (via cuteboyswithcats)