Erik > Erik's Quotes

“Why try to pursue what is completed?”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“Love can only consist in failure...on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth.”
― Alain Badiou, Conditions

“All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.”
― Alain Badiou, Metapolitics

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
― James Baldwin

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life”
― James Baldwin

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. ”
― James Baldwin

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

“He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.”
― Thomas Mann

“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир

“No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
― Frederick Douglass

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”
― Frederick Douglass