Alexander > Alexander's Quotes

“Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“To be in love is to surpass one's self.”
― oscar wilde

“Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.”
― Françoise Sagan

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.”
― Karl Popper

“Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.”
― Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“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

“Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Most of us are always trying to increase our wealth, but you and your officers seem far more concerned with perfecting your souls.”
― Xenophon, Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”
― Edward Said

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
― William Gibson

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“The ‘Islamic State’, that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state.”
― Abdal Hakim Murad, Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida

“We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.”
― Martin Buber

“Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“No one is born a monster. But I wish some people were. It would make it easier to hate them, to kill them, to forget their dead faces.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

“Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“J’ai reçu assez de dons intellectuels pour pouvoir tout sonder, tout aborder, tout saisir en formules claires ; on me croit supérieurement informée de bien des problèmes de la vie ; pourtant, là, tout au fond de moi, il y a une pelote agglutinée, quelque chose me retient dans une poigne de fer, et toute ma clarté de pensée ne m’empêche pas d’être bien souvent une pauvre godiche peureuse.”
― Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

“emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti