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The Secret Lovers
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The Future Is His...
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Frank Herbert
“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”
Frank Herbert, Dune

Masha Gessen
“In functioning democracies, the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible 'laws of history' are derived - and enforced through terror. What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.”
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Quentin Crisp
“If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.”
Quentin Crisp

John   Waters
“My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.”
John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste

Masha Gessen
“Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. ... They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general - and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to [Hannah] Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology - it was their home, and it felt ordinary.”
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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