Rysa Walker

@rysawalker.bsky.social

1142 Followers 1806 Following

SFF author, including CHRONOS Files. ABNA Grand Prize. ITW Finalist. My latest is On Alien Skies. Political junkie and recovering gov't professor. https://www.amazon.com/author/walker She/her. I only respond to DMs if I already know you. RESIST

Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka (but I'm pretty sure it's actually Pam Bondi as a child)
The Duffer Brothers were clearly channeling Jim Henson this season...
Before and after.
Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn but only forgive. ~ Philip Pullman
As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them. ~ Stephen King
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we, too, should have rights. ~ Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism. ~ Aldous Huxley Source: "The Double Crisis" (1949)
There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!" ~ Anne Frank
A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console. ~ Elie Wiesel
The truth is, we’re the ones who make the system. We can unmake it, too. ~ N.K. Jemisin
In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn. ~ Octavia Butler.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive. ~ Theodore Sturgeon
Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. ~ Samuel R. Delany
Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some. ~ Margaret Atwood
Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no. ~ Terry Pratchett
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. ~ George Orwell
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered. ~ HG Wells
The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give. ~ Philip K. Dick
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management.~ William Gibson
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent. ~ Isaac Asimov
The empire’s greatest weapon is our silence. ~ Daniel José Older
The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls. ~ Roger Zelazny
The crowd had that plump, righteous, and slightly constipated look that seems the exclusive province of businessmen who belong to the GOP. ~ Stephen King
Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying. ~ Arthur C. Clarke
This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Freedom is never given; it is won. And once won, it must be defended, for freedom is never secure."~ Ursula K. Le Guin
If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. ~ Carl Sagan
Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. ~ Terry Pratchett (1992) Small Gods: A Novel of Discworld
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. ~ Aldous Huxley
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist. ~ Hannah Arendt
This [Constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. ~ Benjamin Franklin
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet. ~ Mark Twain.
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery. ~ Samuel R. Delany
A propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly. ~ Clifford D. Simak
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not. ~ Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies. ~ Alan Dean Foster
A body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody. ~ Thomas Paine
Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude. ~ Fritz Lieber
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned. ~ Octavia Butler
Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. ~ Philip Pullman
When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions. ~ Stephen King
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote. ~ Terry Pratchett
I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. ~ Kurt Vonnegut A Man Without A Country 2005
No one man can terrorize a nation unless we are all his accomplices. ~ Edward R. Murrow
House Republican leaders on Tuesday quietly moved to shield their members from having to vote on whether to end President Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, tucking language into a procedural measure that effectively removed their chamber’s ability to undo the levies. The maneuver was a tacit acknowledgment of how politically toxic the issue had become for their party, and another example of how the all-Republican Congress is ceding its power to the executive branch. In this case, Republican leaders did so using a particularly unusual contortion: They essentially declared the rest of the year one long day, nullifying a law that allows the House and Senate to jointly put an end to a disaster declared by the president.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ Carl Sagan