Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
― Karl Marx, German Ideology

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
― Frantz Fanon

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”
― Frantz Fanon

“Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
― Louis Althusser

“However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.”
― Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths and Other Plays

“Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.”
― Maxim Gorky

“When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
― Maxim Gorky

“So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your highassed women, and your fancy streets, for I am going home, back to Colorado, back to the best damned town in the USA - Boulder, Colorado.”
― John Fante

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.”
― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue