Sad Truth Quotes

“The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
― Golda Meir, A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography

“No one wants you to be yourself. They want you to be the version of yourself that they like.”
― Marie Lu, The Young Elites

“Ability is of little account without opportunity.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money.”
― Guy McPherson

“Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.”
― Alfred Russel Wallace

“Life is a bitch; you get used though, or you kill yourself. Either way, you're winning.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”
― Clay Routledge

“The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on.

So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text.

[When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.”
― Camille Paglia

“There's no progress without bloodshed...”
― Tamuna Tsertsvadze, Gift of the Fox

“The science that we are doing is a threat to the world’s most powerful and wealthiest special interests. The most powerful and wealthiest special interest that has ever existed: the fossil fuel industry.

They have used their immense resources to create fake scandals and to fund a global disinformation campaign aimed at vilifying the scientists, discrediting the science, and misleading the public and policymakers. Arguably, it is the most villainous act in the history of human civilisation, because it is about the short-term interests of a small number of plutocrats over the long-term welfare of this planet and the people who live on it.”
― Michael E. Mann

“I think drama has to push things to extremes so that we can understand what we are doing in our society.”
― Edward Bond

“All that the people ever get out of a revolution is a change of masters.”
― Arthur Norman Field

“[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!”
― Arthur Koestler

“No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The sad truth is that we have to persist in this doomed world that we have created.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“-It is a little lonely in the desert.
-It is also lonely among the people.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I lost my heart
Under the bridge
To that little girl –
So much to me.
And now I moan,
And now I holler...
She'll never know
Just what I found.
That blue eyed girl –
She said "no more";
That blue eyed girl
Became blue eyed whore.
Down by the water,
I took her hand.
Just like my daughter,
I'll see her again

Oh, help me, Jesus.
Come through this storm.
I had to lose her
To do her harm;
I heard her holler,
I heard her moan,
My lovely daughter...
I took her home.

Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water,
Come back here, man, give me my daughter.

Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.
Come back here, man, give me my daughter.”
― P.J. Harvey

“Hasta la memoria de una alegría tiene su amargura, y los recuerdos de un placer su dolor.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When I was little, Tato told me the story of a frog that was put in a pot of cool water. The pot was put on the stove to simmer, but it heated so gradually that the frog didn't realize it was being cooked until too late. That's how I felt about the Commandant and his plans for Viteretz. Each of his actions was worse than the last, but then we adjusted.”
― Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Don't Tell the Nazis

“The whole world is a hungry stomach with teeth.”
― Kate Birkin, The Consequence of Anna

“I was told it's the blackest clouds you want to keep an eye on. Behind these clouds lie the gypsies sacks. It's said these sacks contain the world's sorrowful histories. That's why it takes such a wind to drag them along.”
― Paula Lichtarowicz, The Snow Hare

“It's sad and sickening that a diseases & natural disaster is less discriminating, racist, egotistical and evil than humanity.
at least their plight doesn't depends upon your religion, cast or the party you are associated with.
they just get you and kill you.”
― Yarro Rai

“Aku tidak mau menyesali atas pilihanku, walaupun harus memilih utk meninggalkanmu demi kebahagiaanku.”
― hermawandae

“The recent history of human population dynamics resembles the ‘boom-bust’ cycle of any other species introduced to a new habitat with abundant resources and no predators, therefore little negative feedback.
[...] The population expands rapidly (exponentially), until it depletes essential resources and pollutes its habitat. Negative feedback (overcrowding, disease, starvation, resource scarcity/competition/conflict) then reasserts itself and the population crashes to a level at or below theoretical carrying capacity (it may go locally extinct).
Some species populations, in simple habitats, cycle repeatedly through boom and bust phases. The height of the boom is called the ‘plague phase’ of such cycles.
Hypothesis: Homo sapiens are currently approaching the peak of the plague phase of a one-off global population cycle and will crash because of depleted resources, habitat deterioration and psycho-social feedback, including possible war over remaining ‘assets,’ sometime in this century. (“But wait,” I hear you protest. “Humans are not just any other species. We’re smarter; we can plan ahead; we just won’t let this happen!” Perhaps, but what is the evidence so far that our leaders even recognize the problem?)
[...] climate change is not the only existential threat confronting modern society. Indeed, we could initiate any number of conversations that end with the self-induced implosion of civilization and the loss of 50 per cent or even 90 per cent of humanity.
And that places the global community in a particularly embarrassing predicament. Homo sapiens, that self-proclaimed most-intelligent-of-species, is facing a genuine, unprecedented, hydra-like ecological crisis, yet its political leaders, economic elites and sundry other messiahs of hope will not countenance a serious conversation about of any of its ghoulish heads.
Climate change is perhaps the most aggressively visible head, yet despite decades of high-level talks — 33 in al — and several international agreements to turn things around, atmospheric CO2 and other GHG concentrations have more than doubled to over 37 billion tonnes and, with other GHG concentrations, are still rising at record rates.”
― William E. Rees

“When I say 'I'm fine' it's a cover up for the feeling of drowning in the mist of stress...”
― Sonnier

“Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth.
[...]
If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel.
[...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home.
[...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation.
[...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now.
On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.”
― Jacob Ward, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

“Aren't you tired of this loneliness, though?" Benjamin inquired, his voice tinged with a hint of concern.
"But deep down, aren't we all lonely? Remember, we enter this world alone and depart from it in solitary fashion. In the end, it's always yourself, and only yourself, against the world! And you always lose. No matter what! That's the sad truth," Invokera mused, her words carrying a touch of melancholy.”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“In romance books, the girl gets away with everything while the guys dote on her and affectionately stroke her hair. So not fair. Fiction is starting to annoy me with all its misleading inaccuracies.”
― Kristy Cunning, Two Kingdoms & One Apocalypse