DJ Yossarian > DJ's Quotes

“I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced, vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open.”
― Dean Ornish M.D.

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“J'aime les chats parce que j'aime ma maison. Et qu'ils en deviennent peu à peu l'âme visible.”
― Jean Cocteau

“He that serves God for money will serve the Devil for better wages.”
― Roger L’Estrange

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
― James Baldwin

“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
― Karl Kraus

“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.”
― Karl Kraus

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.”
― Delmore Schwartz

“‎Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet