Ed > Ed 's Quotes

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
― Christoper Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

“Fornication: but that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.”
― Christopher Marlowe

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― E.M. Forster

“I stopped being half-witted and became sly whenever I took the trouble.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“...moral commitments and emotional engagement were principal reasons for insurgent collective action by campesinos in the Salvadoran civil war.

"Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in Rural El Salvador”
― Elisabeth J. Wood

“Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.”
“We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things…dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact…a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from the touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen…rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It will generally be found that as soon the terrors of live reach the point where they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“Violence is a means of bargaining and signalling value within the marketplace.”
― Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power

“Political bargaining and political entrepreneurship can be seen naked, stripped of the flattering wardrobe of democracy, rule of law and state building.”
― Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power

“Killing, and being prepared to send one's own followers to their deaths is an index of seriousness in bargaining.”
― Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power

“For the student of war, the Horn of Africa offers a cornucopia of violence and destruction. It has interstate wars and civil wars; international military interventions and maritime piracy; genocidal massacres and non-violent popular uprisings; conventional wars fought in trenches and irregular wars fought by jihadists and followers of a messianic cult.”
― Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power

“Most members of the political elites of north-east Africa have come to resemble gangsters rather than civic political leaders.”
― Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power

“If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection of our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Those who can think up feminism or structuralism; those who can't apply such insights to "Moby Dick" or "The Cat in the Hat".”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of the Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“...revolutionary nationalism was by far the most successful radical tide of the the twentieth century.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us [ … ] Some of them have since been struck down. Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a Parisian laundry van, and afflicted Michel Foucault with Aids. It dispatched Lacan, Williams and Bourdieu, and banished Louis Althusser to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife. It seemed that God was not a structuralist.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“I argue that three key doctrines of postmodernist
thought have conspired to discredit the classical concept of ideology. The first of these doctrines turns on a rejection of the notion of representation--in fact, a rejection of an empiricist model of representation, in which the representational baby has been nonchalantly slung out with, the empiricist
bathwater. The second revolves on an epistemological skepticism which would hold that the very act of identifying a form of consciousness as ideological entails some untenable notion of absolute truth. Since the latter idea attracts few devotees these days, the former is thought to crumble in its wake. We cannot brand Pol Pot a Stalinist bigot since this would imply some metaphysical certitude about what not being a Stalinist bigot would involve. The third doctrine concerns a reformulation of the relations between rationality, interests and power, along roughly neo-Nietzschean lines, which is thought to render the whole concept of ideology redundant.”
― Terry Eagleton, Ideology

“Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value.”
― Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction