Aziff > Aziff's Quotes

“Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.”
― Heath L. Buckmaster, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.”
― Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

“One might even argue that if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in a zoo, since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of parasites and enemies and the abundance of food in the first, and their respective abundance and scarcity in the second. Think about it yourself. Would you rather be put up at the Ritz with free room service and unlimited access to a doctor or be homeless without a soul to care for you?...

But I don't insist. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.”
― John Gottman (

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.”
― John Pilger

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.”
― Spinoza

“I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto, Bombay Stories

“Seorang intelektual adalah seorang yang mandiri dan menyampaikan pandangannya dengan segala kejujuran dan kearifannya tanpa menapis atau menyesuaikan rumusannya untuk menyedapkan hati para pengendali kekuasaan.”
― Raja Ahmad Aminullah, Minda Tertawan: Intelektual, Rausyanfikir dan Kuasa

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
― Plato

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you!”
― Martin Jenkins