Helisa Taban > Helisa's Quotes

“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
― Herodotus

“Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”
― Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche to Archetype

“It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that 'moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.”
― Tom Wolfe

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Even were the time to come when there would be neither poor nor rich, yet there will always be wise and stupid, sly and simple, for so there have ever been and ever will be. The strong man sets his foot on the neck of the weakling; the cunning man runs off with the simpleton's purse and sets the dunce to work for him. Man is a crooked dealer and even his virtue is imperfect. Only he who lies down never to rise again is wholly good.”
― Mika Waltari, سینوهه

“ستوان پرسید:چرا می دویدید؟
مرتضی گفت:واسه این که صدای پاهام پشت سرم بود..خوشم می آمد.سالها بود که اونطوری جلوی خودم راه نرفته بودم.تازه مگر چند قدم دویدم.شاید از مثلا میز شما تا اون پنجره.این که اسمش دویدن نیس...هس؟”
― بیژن نجدی, یوزپلنگانی که با من دویده‌اند

“I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“وقتی آدم یک نفر را دوست داشته باشد بیش‌تر تنهاست. چون نمی‌تواند به هیچ کس جز به همان آدم بگوید که چه احساسی دارد. و اگر آن آدم کسی باشد که تو را به سکوت تشویق می‌کند، تنهایی تو کامل می‌شود!”
― عباس معروفی, سمفونی مردگان

“از آن زمان که آرزو چو نقشي از سراب شد
تمام جستجوي دل سوال بي جواب شد
نرفته کام تشنه اي به جستجوي چشمه ها
خطوط نقش زندگي چو نقشه اي بر آب شد
چه سينه سوز آه ها که خفته بر لبان ما
هزار گفتني به لب اسير پيچ و تاب شد
نه شور عارفانه اي نه شوق شاعرانه اي
قرار عاشقانه هم شتاب در شتاب شد
نه فرصت شکايتي نه قصه و روايتي
تمام جلوه هاي جان چو آرزو به خواب شد
نگاه منتظر به در نشست و عمر شد به سر
نيامده به خود دگر که دوره شباب شد”
― مهين عميد