Rik Peeters

“I am amazed that you talk to one another at all. Each of you is a different solution to the human face and personifies a different understanding of man. If a bearded man is okay, then a clean-shaven or mustached one is a monster, a clown, a degenerate, and a general absurdity; and if a clean-shaven man is the right type, then a bearded one is a monstrosity, sloppiness, nonsense, and foulness. Well then! What are you waiting for? Start punching!”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“I write this diary reluctantly. Its dishonest honesty wearies me. For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, who do I pretend that I am talking to myself? Are you talking to yourself so that others hear you?”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“Alleen wetenschap heeft de macht om ketters het zwijgen op te leggen. Vandaag de dag is zij de enige institutie die gezag kan claimen. Zoals de Kerk in het verleden, heeft zij de macht om onafhankelijke denkers te vernietigen of te marginaliseren.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“Ah! I knew the masculinity that they, men, fabricated among themselves, goading eachother into it, mutually forcing themselves to it in a panic-stricken fear at the woman in themselves. I knew men straining to attain Masculinity, convlsed males, giving each other lessons in manliness. This type of manartificially magnified his traits: he exaggerated this heaviness, brutality, strength, and seriousness, and in it was he who raped, conguered by force. He was affraid, thereforece, of beauty and grace, which are the weapons of weakness, he lost himself in male monstrosity and was becoming licentious and trivial or dull and clumsy.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary