Benjamin

“The businessmen to whom, before meetings, I show the collection glance with superficial curiosity at these bizarre apparatuses. They don’t know that I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Let’s be frank: every regime, even the most authoritarian, survives in a situation of unstable equilibrium, whereby it needs to justify constantly the existence of its repressive apparatus, therefore of something to repress.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Accountancy’s night spawns witches. Brush and broom in hand they launch themselves across those smooth surfaces, tracing out their spells.”
― Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark