Liquidlasagna > Liquidlasagna's Quotes

“My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“Existence is everything that can be known, but it is not all that is real.”
― J.G. Bennett

“Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.”
― Harriet Martineau

“The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations.

In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.”
― Huntington, Samuel P

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice?”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.”
― Harold Bloom

“We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.”
― Harold Bloom , The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.”
― Harold Bloom

“Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

INTERVIEWER: It’s always interminable?

BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers.”
― Harold Bloom

“BLOOM: As far as I’m concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they’re called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.

INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?

BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.”
― Harold Bloom

“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac

“These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations”
― Samuel P. Huntington

“Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In the psychical sphere there are no facts, but only interpretations of them.”
― Otto Rank

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Man is nature, nature man, and all crude and raw, stinking, vicious, evil. And holding that evil lightly because the collective mind refuses to recall the spring of mountains, the vault of seas and, of course, beside that, the puny murder of millions.”
― John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am

“We move to Camp David and we hide. They can't get in there.”
― H. R. Haldeman

“Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence. ”
― Kingsley Amis

“Something wonderful happens when you melt cheese between two pieces of buttered bread. The sight and the smell universally evoke smiles; it’s magical. Everyone can relate to it, everyone can feel it, everyone can love it.”
― Heidi Gibson, Grilled Cheese Kitchen: Bread + Cheese + Everything in Between