Vu Quan > Vu's Quotes

“I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. I suppose you'll laugh at this, me saying the governor's a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He's stupid, and I'm not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.”
― Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can accept or reject as we wish, it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.”
― Johann Fichte

“As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“There you have it! - How they anticipate my wishes, how they grant friendship's little attentions, which are worth a thousand times more than breathtaking presents that merely prove the giver's vanity and humiliate us.”
― J.W. Goethe

“No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare