Basant Attallah > Basant's Quotes

“Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."

We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.”
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“A man will come forth, who before all other men has dared to strip his soul naked and give himself wholly over to our most profound questioning, even to the idea of annihilation. A man who has grasped life in its cosmic context, and whose agony is the agony of the world. But such a rising wail will assail him from all the people of the earth, crying for his thousandfold execution, when his voice blankets the world like a shroud, and his peculiar message is heard for the first and last time:
The life on many worlds is like a rushing river, but the life on this world is like a stagnant puddle and a backwater.The mark of annihilation is written on thy brow. How long will ye mill about on the edge? But there is one victory and one crown, and one salvation and one answer: Know thyselves; be unfruitful and let there be peace on Earth after thy passing.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.”
― Voltaire

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
― Voltaire

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”
― Lewis Mumford

“وسعادتي بفهم الناس أكبر من سعادتي بالحكم عليهم”
― Stefan Zweig, Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

“This much is all I ask of my accusers: when my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them the same kind of grief that I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue, or if they think they are somebody when they are nobody.

Reproach them as I reproach you, that they do not care for the right things and think they are worthy when they are not worthy of anything. If you do this, I shall have been justly treated by you, and my sons also.

Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one.”
― Plato, Apology

“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.”
― Socrates, Apology

“I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.”
― Socrates, Apology

“I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.”
― Robert Sapolsky

“النهارده كنت كويس قدام الناس .. بس ما كنتش أنا، ومش عارف إمتى هاكون كويس وأنا!”
― فؤاد حداد

“Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Youth is wasted on the young.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Not why the addiction but why the pain.”
― Gabor Maté

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?