Best 27 quotes of Alice Minium on MyQuotes

As a journalist, in blindly, parroting these police reports, I am also leaving out a significant amount of social context- the context, and begging question all social institutions ought to consider, of whether it is actually advantageous to anyone to persecute nonviolent offenders with a medieval vigilance that feeds the very problems it hopes to fight, and to waste both police resources and valuable news time lending importance to something that is so obviously only “News” in the way that it highlights a particularly ugly facet of our criminal justice system, and by doing so, we lend it a power which is ethically not its due.

As the rhetoric and power structures of old dissolve, from monarchy to capitalism to the space between a vocalized phrase and its indefinable mental inclination, this urge becomes heightened. And eventually, this conflict absorbs and finds its home within that foundation from whence it is borne, and from where its impact will fractal into every other component of power and being; the place where this dysphoria and this exchange occurs, now that we have unloosed the stop from our pressured throats, of the place it occurs, of the place it will be fought, of the place where it matters most- the mind. Because Mind as we know it and matter itself are no longer so perceptually separate. You are reading these words right now, but how? The voice is no longer an element confined in expression to the physical body. I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons. We don’t need nukes. We have the internet.

Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world. I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore. I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.

For it is the silent men, far more than the loud mouthy men on Warwick Boulevard, who make this possible. It is the silent men at 711, the silent men at the YMCA, the silent men next to us in cars, the silent men lying next to us in our bedrooms, the silent men we call our best friends, our boyfriends, and our fathers. It is the silent men, not the loud ones- who permit foulmouthed men to chew me up and spit me out as I walk down the street. It is the silent men who could have stopped this, but who didn’t care to, because they were busy. It is the silent men who said 'Yes' to violence, and who, in their complicit silence, insisted that my world would be impenetrably loud.

For those of us who do find ourselves still sitting in classrooms come the age of nineteen- those of us who are the lucky, the often unwilling, the privileged few- we are met with the opposite of the undergraduate apathy we were taught to endure. We find that learning cannot survive without passion, that evolution cannot exist without chaos, and that self-betterment cannot occur without humility. In fact, if we wish to learn virtually anything at all, we cannot do so without a fundamental level of self-betterment which pervades even our deepest unconscious. If we continue to learn, we realize that this means that our most precious beliefs about the nature of reality itself will be questioned, and everything we know and love and held on to for dear life will be held at gunpoint by the throat by contraposing ideology which threatens our beliefs about existence itself. We will realize that the world as we knew it was incomplete, we will realize the finitude of our own minds, we will realize the complexity and wonder of a rich and multifaceted world that is both more beautiful and more horrifying than we ever knew nor could have dreamed- and we will run in fear, or we will love it. It is a visceral, instinctual reaction, one which equivocates to either shock or awe, and one which likely embodies both. It is a reaction all beings share when faced with something utterly new- the defamiliarizing threat and thrill of the sublime. It is both inexplicably gratifying and deeply uncomfortable to become aware of your own beauty, of the utter, tantalizing, inexplicable divinity of every second of your life- your paralysis in the face of God is a synthesis of both the person you once were, which society has crafted you to believe you are, and the personhood you have always possessed and shared with the universe itself, a personhood which is deeper and richer than all knowledge or any issue which corrupts our class or economics or cripples the politics of our time.

His comments are not compliments, or even propositions. They are declarations of ownership. They are threats. They are the intrusive thumb of male privilege and patriarchal violence, reminding me of my place as I move around within public space. They are the put-down, the screw-you, the worthless-slur, the great derision that is a constant, omnipresent reminder that society allows male sexual violence to function commonly as a social norm. It is the constant reminder that I should always be scared. That I am never safe. That someone always wants to hurt me, and that society will always, always turn its face the other way, as seen by the normalcy with which men can publicly deride me with confidence and gusto in their threats.

I do not often reveal weakness in my writing. I tell stories in magnificent terms; I am, as a person, the ultimate case study in hyperbole. I tell stories borne from passion or anger or righteous conviction, I want to incite a revolution in your heart; I tell stories that are godly and Grand, I am the Great Gatsby of impressive tropes and fiery forging chaos strummed into smooth endings with an adjective; I am a teller of magnificent fables; I am a glutton of adjectival delicacy, I construct empires in paragraphs where villages are more appropriate; you ask me for an apple, I give you ten, then if you hesitate to speak, I will give you six more.

I don’t think anyone deserves to rot in jail the rest of their lives for stealing a pack of cigarettes. The court systems will be no kinder to these people than police have been, and both are avid practitioners of a convenient morality that consigns millions of black Americans to poverty with its selective policies, then persecutes those same black Americans at a disproportionate rate (almost a rate of 1:5) for the same (often nonviolent) crimes, openly regards black Americans with brutality (often killing people in cold blood for no reason other than that they ‘look like’ the grainy photos of 'suspects' I report), and then condemns millions of black Americans, each year, to lives in prison- too often for nothing more than the crime of stealing a pack of cigarettes.

If I could say education had a product, I would like to say it is abundance. But if education had a product, it would be an empty box. And if successful education had a product, it would be the match ignited which set that box on fire and set the mind upon which every essay on “knowledge” ever written in history was cast into the fire to burn.

I, like most millennials, am disillusioned with the net return of academia, but I have not been cheated by education. I have been cheated by a corrupt system, and it is education that has taught me the difference.

In addition, the distortion of actual crime statistics vs. media coverage, shows that news outlets portray black Americans being depicted as suspects or criminals at a rate that exceeds actual arrest statistics for those same crimes by a whopping 24 percentage points- a disparity which reveals a horrific implicit bias in reporting.

I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons.

Is having a child actually fundamentally bettering the world as a whole in any way? There is no shortage of children. Wouldn’t it be better to let people who want children have them, and leave everyone else alone?

It’s one thing to deconstruct and analyze and condemn the institutions of patriarchy and their flaws. It’s another one to feel their bruises on your skin, and their grasping hands pulling your hair and covering your mouth as you scream.

I want to write a thinkpiece about what you did to me. I want to write a critical analysis about the way you put your hands to my throat, the way you threw me against the partition wall. I want to extract a dose of worldly wisdom for all women to sap the power from that pain and into abstraction so we can all live again; I want what you did to be a statistic, I want you to be a memory, I don’t want you to be those hands on my throat.

Keep writing- this is important. Never stop doing the kind of writing that makes you feel alive. Never sell your creativity for money. Your creativity keeps you alive. It is all you have. If you do choose to lease it, it can be quite lucrative- but do so consciously. Don’t expect your groundbreaking, earth-shattering ideas to gain traction in the court of the Almighty Click that delineates human meaning into a six-point scale of Likes, Loves, Hahas, Wows, Sads, or Angrys.

Millennials have found that education does not equal economic mobility, and the works of white patriarchs long dead do little to further our own personal enlightenment beyond operating as an exercise in patience. We graduate high school with souls long dead; we fill in bubbles on standardized tests hoping that the etch of our Number 2 pencil will inscribe prosperity but we know deep down that that is the lot of the privileged few, and maybe if we were men, maybe if we were white, maybe if we were middle-class it could have been us one day but we know in this lifetime it will never be, so at the first opportunity we stop taking tests and look for the chance to find self-actualization or even latent meaning in anything at all.

Most hard-hitting, truly provocative thinkers I have read will argue, of course, for intersectional advocacy and social equality, but each of them still shrouds, indiscriminately, some qualitatively-ranked mythos of ‘learning’ (or, implicitly, education) as some kind of holy grail to cultural change. But education is really, more than anything, the chronicler of cultural change and the documentarian of human developments. It is, by nature, in the business of analyzing, segmenting, and adjudicating things- hardly at all in the business of creating them to propel into the public, as if university campuses were somehow the laboratories of God.

Popular media uses the depersonalized ‘Unidentified Black Suspect’ as little more than a plot device in its parable of implicit racism- while ignoring the fact that these are people, not plot devices, and that black lives are not ours to own, and the story of black culture is not one white people get to define and rewrite according to what generates clicks and viewership.

The meaning of your work can’t be summed up by an engagement button on social media.

There are days when I would gladly hit “Return” and please refund my debt to Sallie Mae to stop those impossible bills from coming, but it is not for the fact that I believe I’ve been cheated. I, like most millennials, am disillusioned with the net return of academia, but I have not been cheated by education. I have been cheated by a corrupt system, and it is education that has taught me the difference. If I could say education had a product, I would like to say it is abundance. But if education had a product, it would be an empty box. And if successful education had a product, it would be the match ignited which set that box on fire and set the mind upon which every essay on “knowledge” ever written in history was cast into the fire to burn.

The worst part is that I want to turn this into a parable. I want to echo a rallying cry of inspiration that sings, Women, we are not alone; Women, these men do not defeat us; Women, these men do not define us; Women, I feel what you feel; Women, we, together, are strong, and for all the loud voices that said no or that didn’t have the freedom to but who still said 'please stop' or 'not right now' or 'I don’t know' or 'I don’t like that' which are all the same goddamn thing, to all the women who said no, you are not to blame for his hard, hungry hands, whether they came at you like raging fists or whether they gripped your face softly, at first, smiling at it and inviting you into the night, only later for you to meet the fingernails and full-weighted back of his hand to keep you there and press you down; to all the women who said no, you are not to blame; to all the women who feel ashamed, you are still the goddess and his hungry hands could not defile you more than mortals could defile a god; to all the women who feel sorry, you did not sin; to all the women who feel angry, I share your rage; to all the women who are too tired to feel rage, to all the women who feel empty, who feel blank, who feel Nothing, who feel small, I feel that most of all, too.

To express Choice, Agency, or Control over my own reproductive choices is Not My Place, it is Selfish, it makes me Inferior, it makes me Incomplete, it makes me Un-Woman. By this logic, to exercise choice over my own reproduction is un-woman. To choose self over reproduction is un-woman. To exercise the agency of Self is to violate social norms of womanhood. Women do not exist to do things for themselves. Women have a social duty to be incubators, regardless of person.

We doing these things because we’re moral, enlightened people. We’re doing these things because we are embedded within longstanding structures of institutional power, and education is just one of these functions. And it is a function with tremendous social power to oppress or to legitimize, to open or to close, to create or to calcify, to inscribe or to erase, to pardon or to punish- to dictate, or to free. The one we choose to do, we ought to choose carefully.

We will realize that the world as we knew it was incomplete, we will realize the finitude of our own minds, we will realize the complexity and wonder of a rich and multifaceted world that is both more beautiful and more horrifying than we ever knew nor could have dreamed- and we will run in fear, or we will love it. It is a visceral, instinctual reaction, one which equivocates to either shock or awe, and one which likely embodies both. It is a reaction all beings share when faced with something utterly new- the defamiliarizing threat and thrill of the sublime. It is both inexplicably gratifying and deeply uncomfortable to become aware of your own beauty, of the utter, tantalizing, inexplicable divinity of every second of your life- your paralysis in the face of God is a synthesis of both the person you once were, which society has crafted you to believe you are, and the personhood you have always possessed and shared with the universe itself, a personhood which is deeper and richer than all knowledge or any issue which corrupts our class or economics or cripples the politics of our time.

What do we do in a hot cold war, when perhaps our reality was so detonated that we sense the surreal nature of this timeline, because it is, in fact, entirely different, and what has transpired here to create so absurdly alien a landscape as the alien city-change of atomized clouds, of the ideological equivalent of a nuclear bomb? But the weapon is crafted to meet the kind of warfare, and this decade’s weapon will not strike in one explosion, because mind is not like that, but slow and persistent and with a face we know, a face that is ourselves, and the most terrifying part is that we deeply suspect and not wrongly so and in no way explained by a foreign intent that, it is, in fact, ourselves we see? And does this opening-tool of a window, this channel and central stage of culture and freedom and self and things that is this internet through which I speak these words, necessarily succumb to one party’s control? Just as body and the things we touch are no longer separate, will self and weapon ever be?

You’re not really mad that I’m not having children. In fact, I would probably love to one day. You’re mad that I’m expressing autonomy of choice. You’re mad that I’m considering other options. You’re mad that I don’t view that as my ultimate potential. You’re mad that I dare be selfish enough to make choices based on my best interest, something women are not supposed to do. You’re mad that I consider it a choice, and that I, a woman, am exercising choice. You’re not mad that I’m not having babies. You’re mad because I’m acting like a man.