Brittni

“In Berlin, it seems, in the end everything becomes either art and/or memorial”
― Peter Schneider, Berlin Now: The City After the Wall

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Surely you know that whatever the play, the curtain always falls at the end.”
― Bandi, The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea