Aphorisms
"Ethics is the evaluation of justifications."
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down
"Anything that is dangerous can sometimes appear attractive and beautiful"
Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish
"The truth isn't always beautiful, but the hunger for it is."
Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times
"Like many intelligent people, he had fallen into the trap of defending an old perspective, exploiting the weakness of others; he had not discovered a new way of thinking. In other words, he was merely regurgitating hundreds of years of philosophical, social and political vomit".
Moses Isegawa, Abysinnian Chronicles
"Wherever justice is lacking the oppressed may provide it for themselves"
Bartolome de las Casas, Historia de las Indias
"This city carried too many centuries on its back at the same time"
Kojo Laing, Search Sweet Country
"As power is born of conspiracy, the mighty cannot but think in its terms"
Stefan Heym, The King David Report
"Few people are spoken of in the way they would choose"
Njal's Saga
"What seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience."
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
"The history of the poor is either sung or lost".
Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere"
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
"Blindness, willful or natural, is the key for success in a persecuting society"
Jose Faur, In the Shadow of History
"I knew most of my lust came from loneliness"
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
"The wise man makes life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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