Catalin Negru > Recent Status Updates

"When you are weaker, never fight for honor's sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane."

"We act as if we live in separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end."

An exceptional book (so far).

“Let me finish,” Wallace said, “Racial stereotyping. Black congressman, majority-Black district—I mean, ‘No human being would want to live there’? Is he saying people that live in Baltimore are not human beings?” “I think you’re spending way too much time reading between the lines,” Mulvaney said. “I’m not reading between the lines,” Wallace replied. “I’m reading the lines.”

Bertrand Russell’s introduction is helpful, but even so, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains a highly specialized and extremely challenging work, one that is far from accessible to everyone.

“But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”

1) This world is led by men... and their flaws... that's it. But this simple and direct aspect is probably a lot scarier to some people than the belief that the world is led by aliens, secret societies or Anunnaki.
2) Politics, like any domain of human activity, is much more complicated than it seems from outside.

I am at 10% of this book and I am already scared... scared of the people that run this world... scared for the fate of this world...

"...in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only 'rights', the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."

"One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."

"Despite the growth of nuclear power and renewables, 85 percent of China's energy today comes form fossil fuels."

"...political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities."

"It does not matter how many people die. I have a mission..."

A rather confusing book... as a subject, I would say it is about human feelings and states. The author takes each of them and talks about them, sometimes in relation to different contexts. As a minus, the religious language and tone is noticeable from space. Also, I think that writing this book in a Romanian framework, sometimes offering Romanian examples, takes from its value.

An interesting book... but the Amazon series is even more interesting...