Alexander > Alexander's Quotes

“When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.”
― Vilfredo Pareto

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
― Michel Foucault

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
― Michel Foucault

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
― Terry Pratchett

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghost in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building--these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these vanyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“The pain receptors have evolved to make us care about injury and disease. Pain is an analog of injury in its inherent similarity. Contrast pain with an orgasm, as a possible analog. If, instead of pain, we always had an orgasm to injury, we would be biologically destined to bleed to death.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it.”
― Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia