Johnny Dyer > Recent Status Updates

I have made it to Part II, I’m gonna put this aside, take a break, read some other stuff, then return when I find the motivation.

The purpose of the separation of powers was to avoid despotism, not to achieve harmonious government; each branch of the government, in the pursuit of its own interests, would restrain excess and… serve the common good… By pursuing its own selfish interests, each state was presumed to contribute to progress as if some unseen hand were guaranteeing that freedom of choice for each state assured well-being for all.

'I always got the sense that he lived a large part of his life in that windowsill, she recalled. 'He couldn't commit to either jump out and end it all or jump back in and start really living.'

Stranger than fiction, Crazy Shit!

“Hughes lay there, frozen. Then a spike impaled the bags on the other side of him. Now he decided he would just stand up and shout, just surrender, because to lie still would be suicide. If the spike came down again, it would surely kill him. What a ridiculous way to die, harpooned in the back of a dustbin lorry, covered in sawdust, with an orange in your mouth.”

In some cases, parents might disapprove: Belfast was dangerous enough already; to sign on as a paramilitary was simply tempting fate. Occasionally a young IRA gunman would go out on a sniper mission, only to round a corner and bump smack into his own mother. Unfazed by the assault rifle in his hands, she would drag him home by the ear.

For years, lan Paisley had been exhorting his Protestant brethren to seek out and expel Catholics who lived among them. 'You people of the Shankill Road, what's wrong with you?' he would bellow. 'Number 425 Shankill Road - do you know who lives there? Pope's men, that's who!' This was retail ethnic cleansing: Paisley would reel off addresses… They were 'Papishers', agents of Rome, and they must be driven out.

'Sulla now busied himself with slaughter, as Plutarch wrote,
'and murders without number or limit filled the city' Names of his foes, with the rewards for their capture set out along with the punishments for anyone who sheltered them. Sulla decorated his palace with their severed heads. Appian put the death toll at fifteen former consuls, ninety senators and 100,000 soldiers on both sides.

The proliferation of the latifundia at the expense of the smallholders meant a great many peasants, who had once formed large parts of the citizen militia, failed to meet the property requirement for military service. The poor and property-less were classified in the censuses as proletarii, or producers of offspring, for they produced and owned nothing but their children.

The fall of this oppressive regime catalysed a series of political reforms that led to a more representative and inclusive political system, in which the plebs enjoyed greater participation through elected officials and a popular assembly where they could cast their votes (in what were known as plebiscites).

Hannibal ad portas (Hannibal is at the gates) subsequently became a phrase expressing fear of an impending
disaster.

How-ever, Pyrrhus sustained such losses among his own troops that Plutarch quotes him as saying: 'If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined - the origin of the expression 'Pyrrhic victory.

The other legacy of the sack was a lingering terror that in 1985 a German scholar called a metus Gallicus, or 'fear of Gauls?
This irrational, paralysing panic would last for centuries and encompass any sort of invader coming from the north

When his two sons sided with the deposed king, Brutus had them beheaded, even watching the gory spectacle himself - a steely act that later impressed Niccolò Machiavelli, for whom to kill the sons of Brutus' became the catchphrase for the unflinching brutality that political leaders needed in order to make tough decisions, maintain their power and preserve the state.

300-strong advisory body, the Senate. The name of this institution, which would survive for the better part of a millennium, derived from senex, 'old man, because it was staffed, in theory at least, by wise, grey heads.

Then a boy emerged out of the earth, clinging to the end of the rope. He was covered in the slippery sewer sludge, and when he stood up, he shone and shimmered in the sun with a terrible beauty. His hair, stiffened by the muck, flared from his head like a crown of black flames.
Behind him, the slum smoke curled towards the sky, and the hellishness of the place was complete.

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeem-able”.

The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her.
The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It's what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.

In the hall with the door shut behind him, Werner presses his forehead against the wall, and a vision of his father's last moments comes to him, the crushing press of the tunnels, the ceiling lowering. Jaw pinned against the floor. Skull splintering. I cannot go home, he thinks. And I cannot stay.

'A coffee, by my oath?' says Max. 'And think you, does a Roman centurion drink coffee, messenger?'
'I don't know,' says the runner. We've got Coke Zero?' I think Roman centurions drank coffee, Max, says the director. It's been around for thousands of years.' Mmm, grunts Max. 'Then I shall have a coffee upon your return.'
The runner nods. 'How do you take it?'
'Soy milk latte,' says Max. 'And hasten!'

"My dear, if these things become ubiquitous, it won't only be navies that are rendered obsolete. I can't decide if I'm glad to be old enough to wish my world a fond farewell, or if I envy the young lads who get to explore this new world."

“Taravangian did not believe in any religion, for they were unwieldy things, designed to fill gaps in human understanding with nonsensical explanations, allowing people to sleep well at night, granting them a false sense of comfort and control and preventing them from stretching further for true understanding”

Interludes, page 333/1306.
I AM THE MEMORY OF A GOD, THE FRAGMENT THAT REMAINS. THE SOUL OF A STORM AND THE MIND OF ETERNITY.

““I don’t have traditions,” Sah said. “Or society. But still, my ‘freedom is that of a leaf. Dropped from the tree, I just blow on the wind and pretend I’m in charge of my destiny.””

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

“Even though she was thin-boned and pale, she felt gigantic amongst the midget children, and she often wished she was pale enough to disappear altogether.”

'Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?’

“Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.”