2026 Reading Challenge

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  • #1
    Dmitri Volkogonov
    “What remains a mystery, however, is not the financial details of his everyday life, but how he, like his comrades Trotsky and Stalin—none of them ever having worked for a living, and none of them having anything in common with the working class—could think they had the right to determine the fate of a great nation, and to carry out their bloody, monstrous experiment.”
    ― Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography
    3 likes

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  • #2
    Blaise Pascal
    “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
    ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
    tags: ironic, sad
    2309 likes

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  • #3
    Blaise Pascal
    “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
    ― Blaise Pascal
    tags: heart, love, quip, reason
    3182 likes

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  • #4
    Blaise Pascal
    “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

    (Letter 16, 1657)”
    ― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters
    tags: brevity, conciseness, correspondence, humor, letters, pithy, wit, writing
    824 likes

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  • #5
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
    ― Friedrich Nietzsche
    tags: friendship, lack-of-friendship, lack-of-love, love, marriage, unhappy-marriage
    42405 likes

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  • #6
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
    ― Friedrich Nietzsche
    tags: dance, music
    10918 likes

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  • #7
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
    ― Friedrich Nietzsche
    tags: humor, philosophy
    8079 likes

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  • #8
    Jean Baudrillard
    “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
    ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
    549 likes

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  • #9
    Jean Baudrillard
    “Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
    ― Jean Baudrillard
    tags: americans, identity
    190 likes

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  • #10
    Jean Baudrillard
    “The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”
    ― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments
    125 likes

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  • #11
    Jean Baudrillard
    “Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”
    ― Jean Baudrillard
    110 likes

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  • #12
    Slavoj Žižek
    “Q- What makes you depressed?

    Seeing stupid people happy.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    tags: the-guardian, zizek
    157 likes

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  • #13
    Slavoj Žižek
    “I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    tags: philosophy, slavoj-zizek
    134 likes

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  • #14
    Slavoj Žižek
    “Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    tags: communism, philosophy, slavoj-zizek
    13 likes

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  • #15
    Flannery O'Connor
    “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
    ― Flannery O'Connor
    tags: criticism, humor, writing
    2050 likes

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  • #16
    Flannery O'Connor
    “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
    ― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
    tags: creative-process, escape, novels, reality, writing
    627 likes

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  • #17
    Mao Zedong
    “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
    ― Mao Tse-tung
    tags: class, revolution, violence
    272 likes

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  • #18
    Virginia Woolf
    “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
    ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
    tags: women
    21194 likes

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  • #19
    Virginia Woolf
    “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
    ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
    tags: freedom, women, writing
    12717 likes

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  • #20
    Thomas Aquinas
    “Beware the man of a single book.”
    ― St. Thomas Aquinas
    tags: books-reading, ignorance, illiteracy, limitation
    488 likes

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  • #21
    Thomas Aquinas
    “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”
    ― St. Thomas Aquinas
    286 likes

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  • #22
    Thomas Aquinas
    “Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine”
    ― St.Thomas Aquinas
    169 likes

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  • #23
    Joseph Conrad
    “I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
    ― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
    tags: work
    896 likes

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  • #24
    John Berger
    “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
    ― John Berger
    92 likes

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  • #25
    Thomas Bernhard
    “Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.”
    ― Thomas Bernhard, Correction
    49 likes

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  • #26
    Leo Tolstoy
    “He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”
    ― Leo Tolstoy
    32 likes

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  • #27
    Slavoj Žižek
    “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
    tags: freedom, language
    574 likes

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  • #28
    Slavoj Žižek
    “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    929 likes

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  • #29
    Slavoj Žižek
    “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    tags: desire, meaning-of-life, satisfaction
    284 likes

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  • #30
    Slavoj Žižek
    “Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
    ― Slavoj Žižek
    tags: love
    235 likes



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