Chris Tolve > Chris's Quotes

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932

“What is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”
― Karl Marx

“In the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all”
― William James

“Foreknowledge of the consequences of an act that is then performed generally argues the will to do it; if this occurs repeatedly, and the doer continues to protest that he did not will the consequences, this suggests an extreme and dangerous disassociation of the personality.”
― Mary McCarthy

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
― Warren Buffett

“There are great groups,—now with common history, now with common interests, now with common ancestry; more and more common experience and present interest drive back foe common blood and foe world today consists, not of races, but of the imperial commercial group of master capitalists, international and predominantly white; the national middle classes of the several nations, white, yellow, and brown, with strong blood bonds, common languages, and common history; the international laboring class of all colors; the backward, oppressed groups of nature-folk, pre­dominantly yellow, brown, and black.
Two questions arise from the work and relations of these groups: how to furnish goods and services for the wants of men and how equitably and sufficiently to satisfy these wants.”
― W. E. B. Du Bois

“As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

“The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

“That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.”
― Joseph Heller

“The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“This is the source of our moaning when one dies—the gloom of sorrow, the steeping of the heart in tears, all sweetness turned to bitterness—and the feeling of death in the living, because of the loss of the life of the dying.”
― St. Augustine

“But thou, taking thy own secret counsel and noting the real point to her desire, didst not grant what she was then asking in order to grant to her the thing that she had always been asking.”
― St. Augustine

“For he who wore no chain was amazed at my slavery, and his amazement awoke the desire for experience, and from that he would have gone on to the experiment itself, and then perhaps he would have fallen into the very slavery that amazed him in me, since he was ready to enter into “a covenant with death, ...”
― St. Augustine

“Yet it drew back. It refused. It would not make an effort. All its arguments were exhausted and confuted. Yet it resisted in sullen disquiet, fearing the cutting off of that habit by which it was being wasted to death, as if that were death itself.”
― St. Augustine

“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

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
― George Orwell, All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays