Crito

“To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.”
― James Joyce

“I remember it for the very special reason that at the first showing of the destruction of Shanghai, the streets littered with mutilated bodies which were being hastily shoveled into carts like so much garbage, there arose in this French cinema such a pandemonium as I had never heard before. The French public was outraged. And yet pathetically, humanly enough, they were divided in their indignation. The rage of the just ones was overwhelmed by the rage of the virtuous ones. The latter, curiously enough, were outraged that such barbarous, inhuman scenes could be shown to such well-behaved, law-abiding, peace-loving people as they imagined themselves to be. They wanted to be protected from the anguish of enduring such a scene even at the comfortable distance of three or four thousand miles. They had paid to see a drama of love in comfortable seats and by some monstrous and wholly unaccountable faux pas this nasty slice of reality had been shoved before their eyes and their peaceful, idle evening virtually ruined. Such was Europe before the present débâcle. Such is America to-day. And such it will be to-morrow when the smoke has cleared away. And as long as human beings can sit and watch with hands folded while their fellow men are tortured and butchered so long will civilization be a hollow mockery, a wordy phantom suspended like a mirage above a swelling sea of murdered carcasses.”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

“A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis like reading himself and not the book.”
― Laurence Sterne

“Will they not for their part have monkeys and marmosets to make them fine coats and doublets of leather and iron? Hands would not be a problem, for the monkeys could work with their hands, and so they would in no way be inferior to man; they could even be writers. They would never be so feeble as not to put their heads together to find ways of resisting these arms, and they would construct machines of their own with which they would inflict great harm on men.”
― Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose