• "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."

- Karl Popper

• "Nobody can make you evil. You've got to embrace it."

- James Robinson

• "I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become."

- Stephen King

• "My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you’ve been mean to someone, they won’t believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it’s time to stop being nice, then destroy them."

- Laurell K. Hamilton

• "I like trigger warnings. I like them because they’re not censorship, they’re the opposite of censorship. Censorship says 'Read what we tell you'. The opposite of censorship is 'Read whatever you want'. The philosophy of censorship is 'We know what is best for you to read'. The philosophy opposite censorship is 'You are an adult and can make your own decisions about what to read'.

And part of letting people make their own decisions is giving them relevant information and trusting them to know what to do with them. Uninformed choices are worse choices. Trigger warnings are an attempt to provide you with the information to make good free choices of reading material.

And my role model here, as in so many other places, is Commissioner Lal: 'Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.'

Trigger warnings fight those who would like to be our masters in another way as well. They are one of our strongest weapons against the proponents of censorship. The proponents say 'We can’t let you air that opinion, it might offend people.' Trigger warnings say 'I am explaining to you exactly how this might offend you, so if you continuing listening to me you have volunteered to hear whatever I have to say, on your own head be it, and let no one else purport to protect you from yourself.'”

- Scott Alexander

• "The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous… and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows."

-N.D Wilson

• “I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult.” said Granny firmly. “Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.”

“But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

“That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.”

- Terry Pratchett

• "If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

- Carl Sagan

• "Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying."

– Terry Pratchett

• "You've got to grab life by the lips and yank as hard as you can."

- Weird Al Yankovic

• "The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible."

- Neil Gaiman

• "Be curious, not judgmental."

- Walt Whitman

• "Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty."

- Charles Baudelaire

• "First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak."

- Epictetus

• "Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering."

- Miguel Ángel Ruiz

• "My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me, and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing, and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier."

- Anthony Hopkins

• "Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."

- Terry Pratchett

• "There are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them."

- David Wong

• "Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway."

- Neil Gaiman

• "Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs."

- Terry Eagleton

• "Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first."

- Steve Irwin

• "I really don’t like thinking of things in that way. People do what they do. Everyone has their way of communicating and sometimes it’s driven by love or hate or fear or kindness or meanness. Whatever. I don’t want to ridicule someone’s behavior. It’s all pretty much okay with me. The only thing I don’t condone is intentional cruelty."

- Brent Spiner

• "Don’t ever feel bad for making a decision that upsets other people. You are not responsible for their happiness. You are responsible for your happiness."

- Isaiah Henkel

• "I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

• "Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others."

- David Plotz

• "Do you need an explanation for why there are dragons when the real world doesn’t have dragons? Because it’s a story. Do you need an explanation for why those dragons can fly when logically a creature of that size shouldn’t be able to do so? Because it’s a story. Do you need an explanation for why a human wiggling their fingers and saying certain words causes lightning to shoot out of them and fry that dragon to a crisp? Because it’s a story. Do you need a reason for why that finger-wiggling human is a gay woman and not a straight man? No, you don’t, because it’s the least absurd thing in this paragraph and you accept all of the others without question."

- Rich Burlew

• "Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today."

- Malcolm X

• "What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are people so shocked at the sight of blood pouring out? Why are a man’s intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as the beauty of youthful, glossy skin? What sort of face would Tsurukawa make if I were to say that it was from him that I learned this manner of thinking - a manner of thinking that transformed my own uglyness into nothingness? Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the inside of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirit and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun…"

- Yukio Mishima

• "Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment."

- Guillermo del Toro

• "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich"

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• "Discipline and self-restraint, when practiced by an individual, a family, or a company is an effective way to deal with this issue. The same thing when forced on a people by their government or, worse, by a self-appointed watchdog of public morals, is suppression and will not be tolerated in a democratic society.

(...) the suppression of the people of a society begins, in my mind, with the censorship of the written or spoken word. It was so in Nazi Germany. It is so in many places today where those in power are afraid of the consequences of an informed and educated people.

In a matured and incredibly diverse society such as ours, the access to all perspectives of an issue becomes more and more important. Those things which in our experience are undesirable generally prove to be unfurthering and sooner or later become boring. That process cannot and should not be stifled.

On the other hand, that which is denied becomes that which is most interesting. That which is hidden -- excuse me. That which is denied becomes that which is most desired, and that which is hidden becomes that which is most interesting. Consequently, a great deal of time and energy is spent trying to get at what is being kept from you. Our children, our people, our society and the world cannot afford this waste."

- John Denver (Senate Statement on Rock Lyrics & Record Labeling)

• "Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones."

-Stephen King

• "Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk."

- Homsar

• "Get more out of life. Watch a fucked up movie."

- John Waters