rmj > rmj's Quotes

“You have been believing that your freedom is secured when you 'put people against the wall'. For once, put yourself in front of a mirror!”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”
― Elias Canetti, The Human Province

“What Pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. Not only the brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ itself which she envisaged, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely. It was always pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable. She believed that she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint's achievement of pure love. It was only convention, she thought, that made one say "sacred heart" and not "sacred brain.”
― Jean Stafford, The Interior Castle

“...no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.”
― Elias Canetti

“Aside from the basic African dialects, I would try to learn Chinese, because it looks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems.”
― Michael Brooks

“When the concept of a dispossessed proletariat was first advanced and began to take effect, it retained the full optimism of increase. No one supposed for a moment that, because their lives were miserable, there ought perhaps to be fewer of them.”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
― Samuel Johnson

“The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots.”
― Rudolf Rocker

“Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.”
― Rudolf Rocker

“The strength of the Government lies in the people's ignorance, and the Government knows this, and will therefore always oppose true enlightenment.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government

“In order to lift others out of a quagmire one must one's self stand on firm ground; and if, hoping the better to assist others, you go into the quagmire, you will not pull others out, but will yourself sink in.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Power has never lacked eulogists, and historians, who are professionally obsessed with it, can explain anything, either by the times (disguising their adulation as scholarship), or by necessity, which, in their hands, can assume any and every shape.”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“He [Kafka] did not have for his private and interior processes that disregard which distinguishes insignificant writers from writers of imagination. A person who thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable.”
― Elias Canetti

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“The gas lamps in the street went out. Shadows crept along the walls. So there were ghosts. During the night they came flying here and crouched over the books. Then they read. They needed no light, they had such big eyes. Now he would not touch a single book on the upper shelves, nor on the lower ones either. He crept under the counter and his teeth chattered. Ten thousand books and a ghost crouching over each one. That was why it was so quiet. Sometimes he heard them turn over a page. They read as fast as he did himself. He might have grown used to them, but there were ten thousand of them and perhaps one of them would bite.”
― Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé

“Im GAY and I PISS and SHIT all over the place”
― Steve Jobs, Business Pleasure Exposed: 50 Beautiful Nature World Views Version For A Better Business And More Pleasure

“Woe to those who shall come after us! They are lost, they will inherit from us a million martyrs and the instruments of torture with which they must destroy a second million.”
― Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive”
― Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Ultimately we are all alone, enclosed in a fixed shell with no exits. And each of us leads his life more or less inertly, more or less conscious and awake. This is a salutary realization that makes life easier and spares one failure. Which is why it's in equal measures cheerful, colourful, wonderful and thrilling. One must never let oneself be troubled by this pleasure in colourfulness and incomprehensible beauty, which is offered at every turn. Rather, one must b e grateful for it anywhere and at any time, sure in the knowledge that it is the inexhaustible outpouring of a secret harmony flowing through everything. And one must connect with this secret reality, the harmony of the universe, which one finds in the smallest and largest things. Then it flows into you, fills you, flows through you, shines from within you, finding your secret allies who will strengthen your soul with their power and make you lissom and flexible when life is tempestuous, felling and splitting mighty boughs.”
― Hans Herbert Grimm, Schlump: The Story of an Unknown Soldier

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“At that moment the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to produce evil. I almost doubted the goodness of God, in not annihilating man on the day he first sinned. "The world should have been destroyed," I said, "crushed as I crush this reptile which has done nothing in its life but render all that it touches as disgusting as itself." I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes; then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, "Let not the creature judge his Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind presumption, in accusing Omniscience for not having made nature perish in her infancy.

God is the god of justice and mercy; then surely, every grief that he inflicts on his creatures, be they human or animal, rational or irrational, every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest which will be gathered when, Sin having spent its last drop of venom, Death having launched its final shaft, both will perish on the pyre of a universe in flames and leave their ancient victims to an eternal empire of happiness and glory.”
― Emily Brontë, Devoirs de Bruxelles

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
― Simone Weil

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“[The State] is a brute force; obedience is a necessity not a duty. Or rather, one has a duty towards oneself not to knock one's head up against the brick wall of the state when it can serve no purpose. On the other hand, one has a duty, and not a right, never to let one atom of the liberty which the state allows to disappear; never to accept official ideology, but to create centres of independent thought. One has a duty to fight against the oppression of the state in so far as doing this does not result in suicide.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy