Ian > Ian's Quotes

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you”
― Henry Rollins

“Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit.”
― Henry Rollins

“Don't push me
I've got a corner at my back
I've nowhere to go except over you.”
― Henry Rollins, See a Grown Man Cry, Now Watch Him Die

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights