august > august's Quotes

“I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: "Dear guest!
To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is
totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200:' The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay . . . The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant's "Du kannst, denn du soUstf" (You can, because you must ! ) ; it relies on a "You must, because you can ! " That is to say, the superego aspect of today's "nonrepressive" hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”
― Friedrich Engels

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly”
― Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
― Mark Twain

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
― Louis Althusser

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Whatever god he adores, or even if he rejects all the gods, the man who desires to create cannot express himself if he does not feel in his veins the flow of all the rivers- even those which carry along sand and putrefaction, he is not realizing his entire being if he does not see the light of all the constellations, even those which no longer shine, if the primeval fire, even when locked beneath the crust of the earth, does not consume his nerves, if the hearts of all men, even the dead, even those still to be born, do not beat in his heart, if abstraction does not mount from his senses to his soul to raise it to the plane of the laws which cause men to act, the rivers to flow, the fire to burn, and the constellations to revolve.”
― Elie Faure

“In Hidden Writing, a main plot is constructed to camouflage other plots (which can register themselves as plot holes) by overlapping them with the surface (superficially dynamic plot) or the grounded theme. In terms of such a writing, the main plot is the map or the concentration blueprint of plot holes (the other plots).”
― Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

“No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying”
― Friedrich Engels