Dienekes > Dienekes's Quotes

“Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Submission is identified not with cowardliness, but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism, but with evil.

To the Roman slave owners, Spartacus was not the hero and obedient slaves were not cowards. Spartacus was not a hero, and obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly.

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality. Authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when one man do not obey other men.

Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and cast exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that the liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist.

Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men to equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.”
― Mark Twain