Stefan Szczelkun > Stefan's Quotes

“In a word, a concert hall is a place where middle-class white people can feel safe together.”
― Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening

“The reverence accorded to the composer’s score suggests that it is a sacred object, which is not to be tampered with, whose authority over the actions of all the musicians playing here tonight is absolute, which commands absolute stillness and silence from those devotees who have assembled to hear it performed.”
― Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening

“The corps of Great Composers who provided the works that are played here are all dead; living musicians may have their works played here from time to time, as a kind of courtesy, but it is the dead who command the loyalty of audiences, and it is their works that are played here over and over again with loving note-for-note accuracy.”
― Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
― bell hooks

“Head in the book. Nose sliding down the valley between the pages.”
― Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry

“She was in the book again and, by the time she got to page-turning time again, she'd forgetting I was there.”
― Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry

“This was a period in which millions, as listeners and participants, helped create a popular music and counterculture that was not just ‘staffed’ and serviced by the creative efforts of the working class and lower middle class musicians, but actually shaped and defined by them in the interests of transforming the historical exclusions and icy and condescending hierarchies of bourgeois culture.” p.31 Red Days, 2020”
― John Roberts

“Live now, die later!”
― Stewart Home, The Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers

“Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recognise it and just go on as before.”
― Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy

“He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”
― H. H. Munro a

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
― St. Francis Of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

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

“If I am a militant it is what I see going on makes me into one.”
― May Hobbs

“For me, this was not a question of opposing voices from below to discourse from above, but of reflecting on the relation of division of discourses and division of conditions, of grasping the interplay of borders and transgressions according to which the effects of speech that seize human bodies becomes ordered or disturbed" p.227.”
― Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor

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

“As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.”
― Kenan Malik

“To resist assimilation is to insist on our working-class origins, on carrying with us the lives and histories of our families, communities, histories, and culture. To give up pretending that one is not who one is, is to render one’s self marginalized. It is to refuse neoliberalism — which insists on homogeneity — with all of its ideologies of aspiration, optimism, progress, and the idea that power and money ought to reside in the hands of the ruling class. I don’t personally care if the middle class has money or material things or power. What I care about is that the working class and the poor lack material goods, jobs that could provide such goods, agency, and mastery over our lives and the lives of those in our communities.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“The society I grew up in, ruled by the middle class, was and remains entirely middle-class. When I look in magazines or books, watch films or TV shows, when I talk to my colleagues and other writers and my students, there always seems to be the same handful of middle-class writers referenced. These books are referenced by the middle-class writer they read about in literary journals. And these middle-class writers write from a middle-class point of view, which is to say from a distance and, for the most part, this means not about the concrete, real world in which the majority of people live. This massive deployment of values and beliefs, aesthetics and desires, is a form of indoctrination, one we remain for the most part, unaware of. Rather than confronting the working class with their values and aesthetics, insisting we adhere to them, the middle class simply present their beliefs and aesthetics as natural, as the world.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“In order to write, let alone think, about social class, we need to have a language for it. And yet we don’t. Or rather, everyday working-class people don’t.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“As Betsy Leondar-Wright put it in her 2005 book, Class Matters: Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working-class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for Southerners or Midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, [heterosexual] people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up; tough, burly guys), country music fans, or gun users. This disdain shows in our speech.”
― Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

“In Nevada I could feel the Long Crisis with a terrifying intimacy, as if it was some sort of uncanny, bodily contact— like the feeling you get camped out in the swirling, galaxy-littered darkness of the open range when a reptile brushes up against your prostrate body. Except that the reptile at least shares with you some deep, serpentine connection, a lineage lost somewhere in the plummet of primeval time. The Crisis, on the other hand, is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space. It is a social terror made of masses of machinery and animals, yet not in any way kin to these components. And what we sense of it today is merely one of its many limbs extending backward from its true body writhing somewhere just out of sight, at home in our own incomprehensible future.”
― Phillip Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

“My mother who died young
In an outlandish rhythm
Would have been seventy now
And perhaps dead in funeral time.
So I may start to mourn
As I would celebrate
The first or second birthday
Of a still-born baby.

- Out of Season”
― Patricia Beer, The Survivors