Iris > Iris's Quotes

“You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.”
― Michael Parenti

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“[t]he freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves …”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!”
― Slavoj Žižek

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?