Helisa Taban
https://www.goodreads.com/helisi
“I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.”
― Journey to the End of the Night
― Journey to the End of the Night
“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
― Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
“Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.”
― God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
― God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
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“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”
― The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
― The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Helisa’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Helisa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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