Tasos Droulias > Tasos's Quotes

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
― Karl Marx, German Ideology

“It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by a functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.”
― Michel Foucault

“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“It doesn't matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not.”
― Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

“Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.”
― Francis H. Bradley

“In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.”
― Kobayashi Issa

“A world of grief and pain,
but the flowers bloom
even then”
― Issa

“The children imitating the cormorants,
Are more wonderful
Than the real cormorants”
― Kobayashi Issa

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in some sort a negation of real life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
― Frederich Engels

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. It is a highly specialized system with critical networks distributed throughout the 1,300 grams of tissue. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of the brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep?”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

“If there is a sense of reality...then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility... the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not... It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell, but from this, our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it. And when, on the other hand, he came to the task of describing heaven and its delight, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.”
― Mikhail Bakhtin

“As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone.”
― Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“I had fled that place in hopes of finding another that had been founded upon different principles and operated under a different order. But there was no such place, or none that I could find. It seemed the only course of action left to me was to make an end of it.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“«Την "ηθική των αφεντικών" την αντιπάθησα όσο και την "ηθική των δούλων". Μια τρίτη ηθική έβλεπα να διαμορφώνεται μέσα μου: Δίνε το χέρι σου σε όποιον σηκώνεται».”
― Μαξίμ Γκόρκι

“You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Φυσικά όλη η ζωή είναι μια διαδικασία ραγίσματος. Αλλά τα χτυπήματα που μας τσακίζουν ανεπανόρθωτα -τα μεγάλα αιφνίδια χτυπήματα που έρχονται, ή μοιάζουν να έρχονται, από τον έξω κόσμο- εκείνα που θυμάσαι και θεωρείς ότι είναι οι αιτίες για όσα συνέβησαν αργότερα και, σε στιγμές αδυναμίας, μιλάς γι' αυτά στους φίλους σου, δεν δείχνουν αμέσως τα σημάδια τους.
Και υπάρχει κι ένα άλλο είδος χτυπήματος που έρχεται από μέσα σου - που δεν το παίρνεις είδηση παρά μόνον αφού είναι πολύ αργά για να κάνεις κάτι γι' αυτό, μόνον αφού το χωνέψεις πια οριστικά ότι, από μια άποψη, δεν θα ξαναείσαι ποτέ πια εκείνος ο πλήρης, ολόκληρος άνθρωπος που ήσουν. Το πρώτο είδος ραγίσματος μοιάζει να συμβαίνει γρήγορα - το δεύτερο είδος γίνεται σχεδόν χωρίς να το καταλάβεις, αλλά ξαφνικά, πολύ ξαφνικά, ξέρεις ότι έγινε.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”
― Huey Newton

“-Τι κάνετε όταν αγαπάτε έναν άνθρωπο; ρώτησαν τον κύριο Κ.
-Του φτιάχνω ένα σκίτσο, είπε ο κύριος Κ. και φροντίζω να του μοιάζει.
-Ποιο; Το σκίτσο;
-Όχι, ο άνθρωπος, είπε ο κύριος Κ.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner

“Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do). Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are. Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that let many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury – but a precondition of democratic life.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?