M. Kirollos > Recent Status Updates

"Liberal democracy is as brief as a bubble. Now and then history treats us to an interval of freedom and civilization and we make much of it.

We forget... that as a species we are generally close to the "state of nature," as Thomas Hobbes described it—a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom."

‘We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their views. of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors…,’ argued Schopenhauer, a leading model of philosophical misanthropy.

Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually own.

"Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can't be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It's the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you."

"La historia del fútbol es un triste viaje del placer al deber".
"The history of football is a sad journey from pleasure to duty".

"If you're one in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there's twenty of you, and most of us now live in cities. What's more, we have become digitally connected to the entire seven billion. Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical. No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent."

"وكان سماحة بكر الناجي يعاني الحياة وهو يسمع صلصلة عجلة الزمن تجد وراءه. إن الإنسان يشقى بساعة انتظار فكيف إذا صارت الحياة كلها مفرغة إلا من انتظار متواصل؟"

"Colonel Aureliano Buendía scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory to discover the privileges of simplicity years late."

"What worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it’s a natural death.” He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. “What worries me,” he went on, “is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you’ve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.”

'"[José Arcadio Buendía] would spend the day walking through the house. "Incredible things are happening in the world," he said to Úrsula. "Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys."'

"I haven't got several identities: I've got just one, made up of many components combined together in a mixture that is unique to every individual."

"Des Esseintes concluded that ‘the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience'. Actual experience where what we have come to see is always diluted in what we could see anywhere, where we are drawn away from the present by an anxious future and where our appreciation of aesthetic elements lies at the mercy of perplexing physical and psychological demands."

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life."

"What he realised was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.'"

"He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable."

“He was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.”

"In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refueling stops, up to five changes of aircraft, and a train journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian airspace. It took twelve days."

"She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject."

"Our instructions, however , were to disembark at the old mining town of Broken Hill to sample the outback and see what might bite us."

Muss es sein?
Muss es sein?
Es muss sein!

'I never cross a bridge at night - because of a vow. After all, what would happen if someone were to jump in the water? One of two things could happen: you would go in after, to fish the person out, and in cold weather it could be your death. Or you would abandon the poor creature; but repressing an urge to dive can lead to strange sorts of cramp.'

My reading list for 2014 is short and clear, hope I can do it this time after finishing the 7 books I'm reading in parallel at the moment.

1- The Better Angels of our Nature - Steven Pinker
2- In pursuit of Italy
3- The End of Faith
4- Ghosts of Spain
5- One hundred Years of Solitude.
6- The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
7- Life Itself - Roger Ebert memoirs.
8- Inverting the pyramid - Jonathan Wilson

"We're lucky Christopher Wren wasn't allowed to replan the city after the Great Fire of 1666. If he had, it wouldn't be a world financial centre today because it would be like Paris, it would be fixed, composed, precious."

"What's London going to be like when it's finished? I say, well, dead - a finished city is a dead city."

'Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.'

'If you ask “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer “So that it’s destruction cannot begin.”'

London meant 'not living in England while living in England'