John > John's Quotes

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. ”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth”
― Chinua Achebe , Things Fall Apart

“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
― Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

“It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick oder Der Wal

“Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“and tell him to paint me a sign, with-"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" might as well kill both birds at once.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale