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There is Something Bad under the bed and it’s making those sounds. She’s certain that if she moves, the Bad thing will know she is awake. If it knows she is awake it will get her.

That’s how these things work: they wait until a person is awake enough to be scared, they wait until a person is conscious enough to hope for mercy, and then they don’t give any mercy at all.

— Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey (10%)

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?

— Civil Disobedience And Other Essays the Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau (96%)

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

— Civil Disobedience And Other Essays the Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau (78%)

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.

— Civil Disobedience And Other Essays the Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau (36%)

"Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."

— Civil Disobedience And Other Essays the Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau (16%)

"“A revolutionary regime, for as long as it lasts, and whatever its purpose or idea might be, is materially only one thing—a revolutionary regime. Now a revolutionary regime means a war dictatorship, or more clearly, a despotic military regime, because a state of war is imposed on society through a part of it—that part which assumed power through revolution. What is the result? The result is that whoever adapts himself to this regime adapts himself to a despotic military government for that is what it is materially at first. The idea that guided the revolutionaries, the purpose to which they had aimed, has disappeared completely in the new social reality, dominated entirely by a war mentality. So what has arisen from a revolutionary dictatorship—and the more firmly the dictatorship is established, the longer it will last—is a militarized society of a dictatorial type, that is, a military despotism. It cannot be otherwise. And it has always been so. I don’t know much history, but that which I know fits with what I have said; it could not avoid it. What came of the political troubles of Rome? The Roman Empire and its military despotism. What came of the French Revolution? Napoleon and his military despotism. And you will see what will come of the Russian Revolution … Something that will retard for decades the realization of a free society … Besides, what can be expected from a society of illiterates and mystics? …"

— Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Schain (27%)

"The true evil, the unique evil are the conventions and social fictions that are superimposed upon natural realities—all of them, from the family to money, from religion to the state. A person born male or female—I mean born to be in adult life a man or woman—is not born by natural law to be a husband, nor to be rich or poor, nor is he born to be catholic or protestant, Portuguese or English. One is all of these things by virtue of the social fictions. Now why are these social fictions bad? Because they are fictions, because they are not natural. Money is just as bad as the state, the structure of the family just as bad as religion. If there were others besides these, they would be equally bad, because they would also be fictions, because they would also be superimposed upon and would hinder the natural realities."

— Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Schain (23%)