brian annan
https://www.goodreads.com/bignothing00
Different cultures and life styles in America use the same words with different shades of meaning. All belong to one society yet live in different worlds.
“Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our beings. Compared with this," he concluded, "thieving is an honorable pursuit."10”
― Anarchism and Other Essays
― Anarchism and Other Essays
“The man who dies rich dies disgraced,”
― The Illuminati
― The Illuminati
“Destruction and humiliation didn’t matter. Only memory and integrity did. Was the hour I was living through right now different from the hour they were living through then? Did it matter? From what hour does one recite the evening Sh’ma?”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.”
― Kolyma Tales
― Kolyma Tales
brian’s 2025 Year in Books
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