Nabil > Nabil's Quotes

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming, cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood—only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque—what we do to one another so grotesque—that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In a hospital. In a refugee camp. In their beds. While making dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetables. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“We must never force nature,’ the physician continued, ‘but we can give her a helping hand when need arises.”
― Damon Young, On Getting Off: sex and philosophy

“sexual pleasure is idiosyncratic. We cannot understand one another’s enjoyment.”
― Damon Young, On Getting Off: sex and philosophy

“love itself is a risk. We commit ourselves to another human being, who is as changeable as we are.”
― Damon Young, On Getting Off: sex and philosophy

“surveillance capitalists vigorously developed a “cyberlibertarian” ideology that Frank Pasquale describes as “free speech fundamentalism.”
― Professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“under the direction of surveillance capitalism the global reach of computer mediation is repurposed as an extraction architecture.”
― Professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“each deletion of the possibility of sanctuary leaves a void that is seamlessly and soundlessly filled by the new conditions of instrumentarian power.”
― Professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“tyranny is a perversion of egalitarianism because it treats all others as equally insignificant:”
― Professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power