Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
― Adam Smith

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.”
― Malcolm X

“One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. From the studies of Krafft-Ebbing onward, we know that it is possible to become excited about anything—from shins to shoehorns. But it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.”
― Hannah Arendt

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
― Werner Herzog

“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
― Jacques Derrida

“You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
― Junot Díaz

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.
I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”
― George Carlin

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.”
― Jacques Derrida

“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?”
― Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.”
― Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche