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Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than keeping us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Rather than affirming the interdependence of various histories on one another, and the necessary interaction of contemporary societies with one another, the rhetorical separation of cultures assured a murderous imperial contest between them.

Nature and letters seemed to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

We must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact ... civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place ... at the end all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds to savagery."

"If one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it."

"For we are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding. But to say that something transcends human understanding is to say that it is unintelligible. But if one allows that it is impossible for to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God."

"The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic towards religion is a point in favour of this hypothesis. For this sympathy towards religion marks the physicists' own lack of confidence in the validity of their hyptheses, which is a reaction on their part from the anti-religious dogmatism of 19th century scientists (..)"

"(..)we cannot refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it.(..)But fromthe fact that we happen to employ a single word to refer to a thing,(..)it does not by any means follow that that the thing itself is a 'simple entity', or that it cannot be defined by the totality of its appearances."

kataleptiskt intryck - sådana som är tydliga och exakta

"Den fenomenologiska känslan av en föreställning under en dröm är densamma som av en föreställning under vaket tillstånd. Om det är sant kan vi inte särskilja dem bara genom att 'se' på dem."

"Another rec:urring aspect of the paranoid style is the speciaI
significance that attaches to the figure of the renegade from
the enemy cause. (...) in the spirital wrestling match
between good and evil which is the paranoid's archetypal
model of the world struggle, the renegade is living proof that
all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings
with him the proof of redemption and victory."

"Yet in his very zeal for freedom he couriousIy assumed many of the charecteristics of the imagined enemy. (...) by censuring the subversive for alleged licentiousness, he engages in sensual fantasies (...)"

"This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry."

"History [according to the paranoid style] is a conspiracy. Set in motion by demonic forces of almost trancendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade."

"(...)the real mystery for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position, but how it has managed to survive at all."

"(..) there would be a party in the United States [wielding to catholic immigrants] (...) that would 'sell their country into an everlasting bondage.' Even so much as a tenth of the voting population, 'condensed and wielded by the Catholic powers of Europe, might decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions.'"

"These [18th century anti-Illuminism] writers illustrate the central preconception of the paranoid styIe-the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpretrate acts of the most fiendish character."

s. 197, tidens optimering

"Tack vare den andres blick, upplever jag mig såsom stelnad mitt i världen, såsom stadd i fara, såsom räddningslöst förlorad. Men jag vet inte vare sig vem jag är eller vilken min plats är i världen, inte heller vilken sida den värld, där jag är, vänder mot den andre."

"... life and life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable power that lusts after itself."

"... all of them leaving behind the single lesson that the most beautiful life is led by those who do not hold existence in high regard."