Bepina Vragec

“Za štrikliranje pasoša sam k znanju primio. Ne tiče me se. Dok je Aleksandar, u Srbiju neću dolaziti. U veću me brigu baca što zabranjuju skupove. A kod nas, gde nema gužve, nema ni smutnje. Srbi nisu, kao Romeji, pogodni za dogovore, sozokletija, tajna društva. Srpska Heterija je nemoguća. Oni su više za naprečac dizanje i svršavanje stvari usput. U smislu toga da krenu na litiju, a završe paljevinom Dvora. U toj osebini valja i tražiti lek belaju sa zakonom protiv zborovanja i dogovaranja. Da l’ se opominješ propalog projekta da dignemo bunu pod vidom sakupljanja potpisa za povratak iz internacije onih propalica, Vučića i Petronijevića?”
― Borislav Pekić, Zlatno runo 4

“When unjust decisions are accepted, injustice is sanctioned and perpetuated; when unjust decisions appear and are violated on those occasions when they appear, it is a healthy discrimination between right and wrong that is fostered; when unjust decisions become the rule, then the government and its officials should be toppled.”
― Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy : Nine Fallacies on Law and Order

“And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December 1910 human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

“Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously. We, for instance—I, Claude Vignon; you, Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you, Finot—we are all Platos, Aristides, and Catos, Plutarch’s men, in short; we are all immaculate; we may wash our hands of all iniquity. Napoleon’s sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the Convention, ‘No one individual is responsible for a crime committed collectively,’ sums up the whole significance of a phenomenon, moral or immoral, whichever you please. However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions