"Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit… - Milan Kundera

Engraved portrait of Milan Kundera, facing left

"Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

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About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, Elisa Cabot (CC BY-SA)

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Kundera

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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

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