Albert > Albert's Quotes

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: 'To fight against Fascism,' and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: 'Common decency.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The POUM line was approximately this:Ít is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois "democracy". Bourgeois "democracy"is only another name of capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of democracy is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers' control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which mind can develop when it frees itself from conditions, from the bondage of things and history.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner. and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and everything that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited