Maarva Karasi Andor, Andor

My name is Maarva Karasi Andor. I'm honored to stand before you, honored to be a Daughter of Ferrix, and honored to be worthy of the Stone. How strange... Feel as if I can see it.

I was six, I think, the first time I touched a Funerary Stone. Heard our music. Felt our history. Holding my sister's hand as we walked all the way from Fountain Square… Where you stand now, I've been more times than I can remember. I always wanted to be lifted. I was always eager, always waiting to be inspired. I remember every time it happened, every time the dead lifted me with their truth.

And now I'm dead. And I yearn to lift you. Not because I want to shine or even be remembered. It's because I want you to go on. I want Ferrix to continue. In my waning hours, that's what comforts me most. But I fear for you. We've been sleeping. We've had each other and Ferrix. Our work. Our days. We had each other and they left us alone. We kept the trade lanes open and they left us alone. We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines churning, and the moment they pulled away, we forgot them. Because we had each other. We had Ferrix.

But we were sleeping. I've been sleeping. I've been turning away from a truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won't heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it's here. It's here and it's not visiting anymore, it wants to stay. The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep. It's easy for the dead to tell you to fight. And maybe it's true, maybe fighting’s useless. Perhaps it's too late.

But I'll tell you this, if I could do it again, I'd wake up early and be fighting these bastards from the start. Fight the Empire!

Mark Milley, United States Army General

We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator …we take an oath to the Constitution … and we're willing to die to protect it.

"We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator ...we take an oath to the Constitution ... and we're willing to die to protect it".

- Mark Milley (2023)
pic.twitter.com/lganqC2gHN

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) May 25, 2025

Luthen Rael, Andor

Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

Everything!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

We have to re-humanise the people whose death has been normalised.

@middleeasteye

“We have to re-humanise the people whose death has been normalised.” Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed her decision to use the term "genocide" in Congress when describing Israel's actions in Gaza during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ocasio-Cortez said that Israel's military operations in Gaza were also endangering the lives of its own hostages who are also at risk of death due to the Israeli manufactured famine.

♬ original sound - Middle East Eye

"Jass and Jassism" [article] - New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1918

[jazz is the] brotherhood of those who, devoid of harmonic and even of melodic instinct, love to fairly wallow in noise. [it is a] manifestation of a low streak in man's tastes that has not yet come out in civilization's wash.

Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepherd, The American President

You want free speech? Let's see you acknowlege a man whose words make your blood boil, who is standing centerstage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.

Morgan Freeman as Red, The Shawshank Redemption

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Demoman

So... T'all you fine dandies so proud, so cocksure. Prancin' aboot with your heads full of eyeballs! Come and get me I say! I'll be waiting on ya with a whiff of the 'ol brimstone. I'm a grim bloody fable... with an unhappy bloody end!