Béla’s Reviews > Babel > Status Update

How wonderful is it that I can read my favourite book again but now related to a university course!

"'I'll play. Ask me anything. Let's see if we can change some future historian's mind.'"

"No - this threat, the Army - it all means it's working, don't you see? It means they're scared. On the first day they still thought they could order us around. But they've felt the consequences now. They're terrified. Which means if we can just hold on for a bit, if we can just keep this up, we'll win."

So this is the title, this is the necessity of violence.

"Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence."

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
trans, Richard Philcox

"I wish I'd loved her better."


This book is taking such a sudden sad turn in just one chapter that this quote from the first page of the next chapter hits even harder. An absolute masterpiece of writing.


"You are the exception. You are the lucky one, the elevated. Or do you really find more in common with those poor fools in Canton than your fellow Oxfordians?"

Identity consists of many things, not just study.

"It doesn't matter that you'll fire it. It matters that someone thinks you will. You see, my colleagues in there are still holding on to this unbelievable faith in human goodness. But I'm a sceptic."

For humans to be inherently good in nature, there is too much bad in this world. To me, this scepticism feels valid.

"Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flaggelation. You're obsessed with punishment."

"Free trade. This was always the British line of argument - free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What 'free trade' really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access?"