James Kolar > James's Quotes

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
― Alasdair Gray

“I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two—
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.”
― Sigmund Freud

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
― Leopold Stokowski

“There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. ”
― Simone Weil

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

“The main point about civility is...the ability to interact with strangers without holding
their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce
some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“Beneath the dream of fame, another dream, a dream of no longer dissolving and staying dissolved in the grey, faceless and insipid mass of commodities, a dream of turning into a notable, noticed and coveted commodity, a talked about commodity, a commodity standing out from the mass of commodities, a commodity impossible to overlook, to deride, to be dismissed. In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

“People are cast in the underclass because they are seen as totally useless; as a nuisance pure and simple, something the rest of us could do nicely without. In a society of consumers - a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value - they are people with no market value; they are the uncommoditised men and women, and their failure to obtain the status of proper commodity coincides with (indeed, stems from) their failure to engage in a fully fledged consumer activity. They are failed consumers, walking symbols of the disasters awaiting fallen consumers, and of the ultimate destiny of anyone failing to acquit herself or himself in the consumer’s duties. All in all, they are the ‘end is nigh’ or the ‘memento mori’ sandwich men walking the streets to alert or frighten the bona fide consumers.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

“In other words, it is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning ― but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things. Love is akin to transcendence; it is but another name for creative drive and as such is fraught with risks, as all creation is never sure where it is going to end.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds