If you take a neuroscientific approach to rewiring your brain, then it requires you to stop remembering, retelling, reiterating, and maybe even repeating the past. It demands that you remember something new.

Getting older is not an intellectually demanding process.

Sometimes life requires more of you than you have to give & demands you plunge into the reinvention of yourself if you truly wanna live.

It is a queer thing. In a time of great need, when powerful leadership is demanded, the people-confused and excited-hear only the strident voices of the audacious, and refuse to listen to the voice of wisdom which, being wise, is temperate.

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.

"You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place!

This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.

In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...

Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it-all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself . . . . And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

As we are whiling away days of idleness, time may flow rashly through the screen of our thoughts and veil the relevance of individual fragments in our story. The clock of reality can arrest us, though, and compel us to confront the demands of the truth. ("Non mais, t'as vu l'heure !")

In a way, the world?view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Art demands to be appreciated.

The truth is what it is, and it demands good old-fashioned values from us. So, dressing up what we would love to be true as the truth is always an exercise in futility in the long run.

Friends who love us know that motherhood is about transitioning--and adjusting, constantly, to those changes. We must become masters of change because that is what life demands of us.

An abolitionist is, as I have developed that notion, one who (1) maintains that we cannot justify animal use, however "humane" it may be; (2) rejects welfare campaigns that seek more "humane" exploitation, or single-issue campaigns that seek to portray one form of animal exploitation as morally worse than other forms of animal exploitation (e.g., a campaign that seeks to distinguish fur from wool or leather); and (3) regards veganism, or the complete rejection of the consumption or use of any animal products, as a moral baseline. An abolitionist regards creative, nonviolent vegan education as the primary form of activism, because she understands that the paradigm will not shift until we address demand and educate people to stop thinking of animals as things we eat, wear, or use as our resources.

Henceforth He demands that all such conventions should cease; that we should be entirely open and honest with Him, that we should display ourselves as we really are -- that we should lay aside, in a word, all those comparatively harmless make-believes and courtesies, and be utterly real.

There will come times when the gravity of the events occurring around us will call us out. And such will be the nature of these events that they will demand that we act on what we profess. And the fact of the matter is, that time is never 'not' happening.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundation-such as truth demands-when they are thus based. (?) Where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.