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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bab143b | Are, however, the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, deep indifference towards the non-believer's way of life. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| d34d420 | Here is an old phrase I like: "The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves." You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don't like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that "you are enclosed in your culture." No, we have .. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 2ec17ca | But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This "absurdity" is simply the price of freedom--freedom is not free, as they put it in the film [300]. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is .. | freedom | Slavoj Žižek | |
| 0681cf4 | He was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but his own destruction | John le Carré | ||
| f6d0907 | I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy. | John le Carré | ||
| 6dda896 | I don't break down," she announced. "Got it?" He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist. "I never break down. I'm a lawyer." | emotions feelings i-m-sorry john-le-carre sorry | John le Carré | |
| a395b0a | Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad. | espionage heroes spy | John le Carré | |
| 74fbc6e | lqd 'khbrny wldyW b'n lTryq@ lfDl~ ltdbr 'mr lmtnmryn hy hnthm bt`lyq dhky wldh` thm lstdr@ wlmGdr@. | Jodee Blanco | ||
| 71e313d | lmnbwdhwn l ynswn bdan | Jodee Blanco | ||
| 000e48d | ndm kn zml Sfy yskhrwn mny 'w yhmswn klmt bGyD@ fy q`@ ldrs@ , knt '`zl nfsy `nhm w'nZm qSyd@ , w'GwS fy Swt lqlm lhdy' whw ytHrk fwq lSfH@ . | Jodee Blanco | ||
| 0c31722 | Joan commented, upon sentence, "My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me." | love underpeople | Cordwainer Smith | |
| 3ac18d7 | There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting. | Cordwainer Smith | ||
| 806c931 | The idea that people would be happier if they maintained a constant state of realism is a beautiful sentiment, but Taylor and Brown found just the opposite. They presented a new theory that suggested that well-being came from unrealistic views of reality. They said you reduce the stress of terminal illness or a high-pressure job or unexpected tragedy by resorting to optimism and delusion. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you thro.. | David McRaney | ||
| 00cf9bb | Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goa.. | David McRaney | ||
| 6036289 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can't manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking. | David McRaney | ||
| e31b141 | Even as the brain is dying, it refuses to stop generating a narrative, the scaffolding upon which it weaves cause and effect, memory and experience, feeling and cognition. Narrative is so important to survival that it is literally the last thing you give up before becoming a sack of meat. | David McRaney | ||
| 3a7915c | The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards. | David McRaney | ||
| 819e16a | more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none. | John le Carré | ||
| 2a58a70 | Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he.. | John le Carré | ||
| 24d4a3f | They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world. | John le Carré | ||
| ff09db5 | Most of all he asked about their philosophy. To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all. 'What do you mean, a philosophy?' he replied. 'We're not Marxists, we're nothing. Just people.' 'Are you Christians, then?' 'Not many, I shouldn't think. I don't know many.' 'What makes them do it, then?' Fiedler persisted. 'They must have a philosophy.' 'Why must they? Perhaps they don't know, don't even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,'.. | John le Carré | ||
| ca1f8eb | The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes. | John le Carré | ||
| 7e1c061 | There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper? | John le Carré | ||
| d383540 | He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about. | John le Carré | ||
| 4ceb41e | Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. | John le Carré | ||
| ca4e311 | Why and earth should an unshaven young man in a track suit be carrying a basket of oranges and yesterday's newspaper? The whole boat must of noticed him! | John le Carré | ||
| 6cd1290 | A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world." --JOHN LE CARRE" | Chris Guillebeau | ||
| b67af3f | There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to.. | John le Carré | ||
| a46fa07 | For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head. | head-shape | John le Carré | |
| 5217e6a | And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own. | John le Carré | ||
| 29563a3 | Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant. | time-management urgent | John le Carré | |
| 71d995f | He appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes. | ostentation taste | John le Carré | |
| 5f44896 | George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car. 'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did. | pyrrhic-victory smiley | John le Carré | |
| 93c06ad | Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed. He was a floating bachelor with a grey mane and that nimbleness which only fat men have. | fat-men fleshy nimbleness | John le Carré | |
| 862ba83 | Demos are mock battles, never the real thing. Everybody knows where they're going to happen, and when and why. Nobody gets seriously hurt. Well, not unless they ask for it. (ch. 4) | John le Carré | ||
| 55e397b | Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. | John le Carré | ||
| b4de456 | What did theories matter any more? She wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be. (...) For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has.. | John le Carré | ||
| f098729 | Awkward. That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do. | feeling knowing sister | Markus Zusak | |
| b7017e7 | All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss. | smiles strong undaunted young | Markus Zusak | |
| 7ab6712 | There must be aplace in heaven for those who have been where I have been. | Markus Zusak | ||
| cd50b87 | We smell the impact of traffic and humans. Humans and traffic. Back and forth. We taste our moment, swallowing it, knowing it. We feel our nerves twitching inside our stomaches, lunging at our skin from beneath. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 6f68938 | Around us I can sniff out a savagery in the noisy southern air. It knifes it's way into my nose, but I do not bleed blood. It's fear I bleed, and it gushes out over my lip. I wipe it away, in a hurry. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 78a34b7 | I wanted nothing for free. Nothing came for free at our place anyway. | nothing nothing-comes-for-free | Markus Zusak | |
| 5091feb | There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared. | city household knew self-contained something-happening story | Markus Zusak |