A Quote by George R. R. Martin
An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [...] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
Related Quotes
The true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves.
Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders ourview. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tends to obscurity; too much truth is paralyzing.... In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them.
As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.
We too often satisfy ourselves with the perishable things of time, forgetting the opportunities we have of developing within us the great, the eternal principles of life and truth. The Lord wishes to establish a closer and more intimate relationship between Himself and us; He wishes to elevate us in the scale of being and intelligence, and this can only be done through the medium of the everlasting Gospel which is specially prepared for this purpose.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.
The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us.
We were king’s men, knights, and heroes . . . but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all.” “Are you saying you are monsters?” “I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne
We humans have the capacity to wreak horrors on each other. But we also have the capacity to survive those horrors.
But : We're still human. Human because we keep on battling against all these horrors, the horrors caused and not caused by us. We battle not in order to stay alive, that would be too materalistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other.
To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man -- these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.
When we're true to ourselves, we become instruments of truth for the planet. Because we're all connected, we touch the lives of everyone around us, who then affect others. Our only obligation is to be the love we are and allow our answers to come from within in the way that's most appropriate for us.
There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.
We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. ... while everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.
My great hope for us as young women is to start being kinder to ourselves so that we can be kinder to each other. To stop shaming ourselves and other people for things we don't know the full story on - whether someone is too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, too loud, too quiet, too anything. There's a sense that we're all ‘too’ something, and we're all not enough.
...but we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation-liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.
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