Zendegi

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“No book has ever been able to redress a single historical injustice. Neither will this one. It wasn't meant to in the first place. Nevertheless, it is a small, personal effort so people don't forget [[Sarajevo]] and what it was. It aims to bring the story of Sarajevo to the point where it was conceived and where it will end. To try-without being pretentious-to salvage, from under the often artificially construed and maintained myth about the city, the People of Sarajevo, those that never wanted to be mythologized or immortalized. Those that only wished to remain normal, people going about their business, in their own city, people whose simple wish wasn't granted. Those that never, not even at the end, managed to understand ordinary and simple things and kept asking questions like "Why are they doing this to us?" The last people on this planet to understand that life and death are not controlled by the heart and reason, kindness and happiness, but machinations and greed, force and barbarity”
― Zlatko Dizdarević, Portraits of Sarajevo

“When people are committed to a belief and a course of action, clear disconfirming evidence may simply result in deepened conviction and increased proselyting. But there does seem to be a point at which the disconfirming evidence has mounted sufficiently to cause the belief to be rejected.”
― Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World