Abderrazak Baddou > Abderrazak Baddou's Quotes

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

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault

“power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”
― Albert Einstein

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
― Nikola Tesla

“We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

“philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts” .”
― Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.”
― Gorgias

“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I'd been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. "This is the colour of wheat and gold.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Women won't have total equality until men can get pregnant.”
― Diana Palmer

“No revolution succeeds without sacrifice.”
― Diana Palmer, September Morning

“One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.”
― Jacob Appelbaum, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet