Ivan Jurisic > Ivan's Quotes

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”
― Camille Paglia

“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
― Frederick Douglass

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Jung

“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Die Sklaverei lässt sich bedeutend steigern, indem man ihr den Anschein der Freiheit gewährt.”
― Ernst Jünger

“El lenguaje de la política -en contra de sus propias intenciones- suele ser impreciso y ambiguo, de ahí el riesgo de su transformación, por pereza mental o por motivos utilitarios, en etiquetas o fórmulas estereotipadas, en eslóganes publicitarios o simples estribillos que no dicen nada.”
― Juan José Sebreli, El malestar de la política

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
― Vaclav Havel

“My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass”
― Ezra Pound

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Summertime

“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
― Victor Hugo, Intellectual Autobiography: Ideas on Literature, Philosophy and Religion

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”
― Mark Twain

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”
― Gustav Mahler

“Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .”
― T.S. Eliot

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Sometimes I look a the Moon, and I imagine that those darker spots are caverns, cities, islands, and the places that shine are those where the sea catches the light of the sun like the glass of a mirror...I would like to tell of war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me when I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful'.”
― Umberto Eco

“For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth....Such are the autumn people.”
― Ray Bradbury

“It was eight in the morning, a time when drinkers are trying either to forget who they are or remember where they live.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out...”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Activism and education exist in a fundamental tension—activism presumes to know the truth with enough certainty to act upon it, while education is conscious that it does not know for certain what is true and therefore seeks to learn more.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Victoria Ocampo era por cierto una oligarca, pero no todas las oligarcas eran Victoria Ocampo. Las damas de la alta sociedad, como se decía entonces, no empleaban su dinero y su tiempo en la difusión de las letras ni abrazaban la causa del feminismo ni transgredían costumbres establecidas, ni se animaban a proclamar su agnosticismo; nada tenían en común con Victoria”
― Juan José Sebreli, Escritos sobre escritos, ciudades bajo ciudades