Quotes April 23, 2022

The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation.
Richard Pipes
 
 
 
 
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
George Orwell
 
 
 
 
Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
 
 
 
 
I belong to the most ancient empire on this globe. You, by your own statement, belong to the most dependent and ill-treated nation of serfs ever deprived of its liberties. The flag of my country floats over the third greatest navy in the world. Yours is to be seen derisively displayed on the 17th of March in the public streets and triumphantly hoisted on an occasional gin-mill. The ambassadors and consuls of my nation rank at every court in Europe with those of Russia, Germany, England and France. Those of your race may be found cooling their heels in the lobbies of any common council in which the rum-selling interest in politics predominates. The race which I represent is centuries old in every art and science. That of which you are the spokesman apologizes for its present ignorance and mental obscurity with the plea that your learning and literature are lost in the mythical past.
Wong Chin Foo, On Wong’s Chinese vs. Denis Kearney’s Irish (1883)
 
 
 
 
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
Stewart Brand
 
 
 
 
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell
 
 
 
 
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Stephen Sondheim
 
 
 
 
There’s no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon.
Vladimir Putin, quoting Leo Tolstoy
 
 
 
 
Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more cheerful.
Joseph Stalin, 1935