Ten Short Quotes

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For – back to Schlegel – the nature of the world only reveals itself to us in fragments. The fragment is the only way to refer to the lost totality of the world without offering some kind of unified whole as a consolation; that is, without lying.
- Adam Jasper


In the vision I had two years ago I came to the end of myself and found other people standing there- and knew that the present was a gift of time in which to sing a true history of equal historical selves.
– Peter Dimcock


Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself.
- Gianni Vattimo


The state is to its map as its citizens are to their passports. No map = no existence; that is the hard verdict modernity hands down to upstart states no less than to travelers.
- Michael Taussig


The deplorable thing is that the people who were tortured yesterday, torture today.
- B. Traven, The Death Ship


Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need?
– Ludwig Wittgenstein


If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini


Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.
- David Graeber


Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.
- Luc Boltanski


If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
- Jonas Salk, Biologist



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