Jason > Jason's Quotes

“No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“Societies get the criminals they deserve-Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne”
― Douglas Starr, The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science

“Why, flowers are violent, cruel, terrible, splendid...like love.”
― Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden

“Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
― Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden

“Art should grasp the mind the way the vagina grasps the penis-Marcel Duchamp”
― Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare: A Biography

“A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting-Marcel Duchamp”
― Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare: A Biography

“I don't want to be pinned down to any position. My position is the lack of a position, but of course you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk you spoil the whole game-Marcel Duchamp”
― Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare: A Biography

“I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“If there is something comforting-religious , if you want-about paranoia-there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. Thus abandoning certain investigations is out of the question. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”
― Georges Batailles

“Mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters.”
― Georges Batailles

“There was an element of secrecy in a home library. It breathed of intellectual anarchy.”
― Isaac Asimov, Earth Is Room Enough

“Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.”
― Umberto Eco , The Prague Cemetery

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”
― Livy , The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome

“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn't; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy's red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn who called himself the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater or the black who carried a rose and noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who'd collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“Most politicians are pigs...It's a funny thing about pigs...They have an odd way of keeping warm in winter if they find themselves outside. You see, pigs don't know if they're cold, provided their nose is warm. So they stand around in a circle with their nose between the hind legs of the pig in front of them. Would you call that a curious relationship?...I would call that a Satanic relationship.”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

“It is hard to understand why the modern West has been so much more troubled by sexual images than by violent ones. Murder has always been illegal in the West, but the representation of murder has rarely inspired the kind of hue and cry generated by the depiction of adults having sex. Those who claim that pornography will impel children to engage in sexual conduct seem not the least bit concerned that war stories and Westerns will encourage children to kill their neighbors. For all the talk of "sex and violence" on television, no one seems to blink at the amount of blood spilled in a boxing match, but one can only imagine the outcry that would follow if a similar amount of semen were shown in a bedroom scene of a daytime soap opera.”
― David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History

“The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History: A Chronicle of Pestilence and Plagues

“My father says everything's going to be machines when we grow up. He says the only jobs open will be in junkyards for busted machines. The only thing a machine can't do is play jokes. That's all they'll use people for, is jokes.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
― Socrates