Born on April 14 — Quotes

“ For a national struggle, Bose wants another Congress. In the name of struggle he disrupts the very organ of struggle and thereby renders struggle itself impossible. He only scatters to winds the achievements of the past struggles—the national unity they created and which is today embodied in the Congress. To raise the slogan of another Congress is not to be pro-struggle but just a disruptor, pure and simple. The slogan of another Congress is not only a cover for an anti-struggle policy, is not only disruptive of national unity but is an alternative road to compromise.

The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

I as President of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic in such a destructive situation made every possible effort to return the dialogue to normal and prevent an escalation of tension (with Moldova).

If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.

Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought.

When you consider that presidents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human beings like you and me and the laundryman, the thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face.

Certain contemporary overenthusiastic market socialists tend, contrariwise, to forget that the market is intrinsically repugnant, because they are blinded by their belated discovery of the market's instrumental value. It is the genius of the market that it (1) recruits low-grade motives to (2) desirable ends; but (3) it also produces undesirable effects, including significant unjust inequality. In a balanced view, all three sides of that proposition must be kept in focus, but many market socialists now self-deceptively overlook (1) and (3). Both (1) and (2) were kept in focus by the pioneering eighteenth-century writer Bernard Mandeville, whose market-praising Fable of the Bees was subtitled Private Vices, Public Benefits. Many contemporary celebrants of the market play down the truth in the first part of that subtitle.

The problem of the public peace which was the great desideratum of the Middle Ages was not solved at one stroke, but at least the impetus was given.

Seven of these 22 riots, or roughly one-third of them, occurred on the day of the celebration of the annual Muslim festival of Bakr-i-Id at the end of May. The celebration of this festival is always a dangerous time in Hindu-Muslim relations. The Muslim regard it as a day of animal sacrifice, and as the animal chosen is almost always a cow the slightest tension between the two communities is apt to produce an explosion. (Chapter 7)

Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or "dematerialized."

Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking place.

The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy. This contented the devils, and Jurgen had learned long ago never to fall out with either of these codes, without which, as the devils were fond of observing, Hell would not be what it is.

Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

Now grandfather Satan’s wife was called Phyllis: and apart from having wings like a bat’s, she was the loveliest little slip of devilishness that Jurgen had seen in a long while.

Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets.