Cultic Quotes & Sayings

And, impossible though it may be, we will have to resist partisanship. The only way back to a free society, to a country where no one need fear the president's wrath or impulses, is to unwind the factionalism that has helped destroy this country. We have to forge a new coalition on right and left to resist fascism's reach and cultic power. In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president - whose grace feels now almost painful to recall - it is surely possible. — Andrew Sullivan

Cornelius Tacitus when he says, that men are readier to pay back injuries than benefits, since to requite a benefit is felt to be a burthen, to return an injury a gain. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Back in August, I wrote a post about the supposed race to the bottom with ebooks, refuting some nonsense written by an establishment bonehead.
This meme won't die. People are still convinced that new ebooks are going to be priced at ten cents, and writers will starve, and this will cause a second Great Depression where banks will close and people will be forced to buy Kindles with food stamps, and then the earth will enter another ice age where all the bunnies will freeze to death. — J.A. Konrath

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement. — Malcolm Lowry

Now, it's finally time to reveal some secrets. — Brandon Sanderson

I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure. — Ornette Coleman

It is obvious that 'Algiz' is a pure Semitic word. The presence of the definite article is one indication. Another sign for us lies in its shared etymology with the name of 'Giza' - the location of the Scales/Balance whose Semitic word is derived from that very same etymology. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

But where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value. And it is having set the scene for this process to occur that gives Atget, the man who captured so many deserted Parisian streets around 1900, his incomparable significance. Quite rightly it has been said of him that he recorded those streets like crime scenes. A crime scene, too, is deserted. Atget snaps clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. — Walter Benjamin

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich. — Edward Abbey

Especially in the Christian cult (wine and bread on the altar-tomb as the mystical body of Him Who Was Crucified, Who died and Who
was resurrected; the sacrament of new life and resurrection through food and drink). In the cultic redaction all elements of the complex appear not in a real but in a sublimated form, and are linked with one another not via a real-life narrative, but through mystic-symbolic links and interrelationships, and the triumph of life over death (resurrection) is accomplished not on a real and earthly plane but on a mystical one. — Mikhail Bakhtin

this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses.20 — Jennifer Larson

More often than not, leaving a cult environment requires an adjustment period, not only to reintegrate into "normal" society but also to put the pieces of yourself back together in a way that makes sense to you. When you first leave a cultic situation, you may not recognize yourself. You may not know how to identify the problems you are about to face. You may not have the slightest idea who you want to be. The question we often ask children, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" suddenly takes on a new meaning for adult ex-cult members (p. 1). — Madeleine Landau Tobias

"Would you, do you, my dear?" rejoined the Captain ... "I don't know. It's difficult navigation. She's very hard to carry on with, my dear. You never can tell how she'll head, you see. She's full one minute, and round upon you next." — Charles Dickens

The laws governed people's happiness. To be lawless was to be happy. — Jess C. Scott

It will be possible in a few more years to build radio controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the Earth. A little later, manned rockets will be able to make similar flights with sufficient excess power to break the orbit and return to Earth. (1945) [Predicting communications satellites.] — Arthur C. Clarke

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. — Walter Benjamin

My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams. — Daniel Pinkwater

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't. — Ashleigh Brilliant

Cult leaders are often self-styled prophets who have not studied with great teachers or undergone lengthy training or discipline themselves ... Many of the most dangerous cultic figures of our times have no such stabilizing context of tradition, lineage or transmission, but are self-proclaimed gurus who sway their followers through their charismatic talents ... — John Welwood

It takes no great imagination to see that this picture of David is drastically different from the portrayals given in the Samuel traditions. It is not hard to see that such a constructed picture of David surely serves the context of the fifth century and no doubt serves the specific claims of the Levitic priesthood. The truth about David given here is that David is a pious, cultic man who finds his life shaped and enhanced by such explicit religious commitment. He is indeed a man of the assembly. — Walter Brueggemann

What the first Christians knew as the "New Testament" was not a book, but the Eucharist. In a cultic setting, at a solemn sacrificial banquet, Jesus made an offering of his "body" and "blood." He used traditional sacrificial language. He spoke of the action as his memorial. He told those who attended to repeat the action they had witnessed: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). — Scott Hahn