Theo

“As philosopher Aldo Tassi points out, there is no performative person that preexists the person wearing a mask: “There is no role that stands ‘behind’ all our other roles and defines what we ‘really’ are, no more than there is an act of knowing (a knowing that) that stands ‘behind’ the acts of knowing and defines the possession of knowledge (knowing how)” (Tassi 1993, 207).”
― Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

“I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
― Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman: Many pictures

“As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful,”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition