Neo Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Neo. Here they are! All 100 of them:

She’s like Bruce Lee, the Hulk and Neo from The Matrix all rolled in to one.
Kendare Blake (Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna, #1))
Before the man could answer V cursed "If I have to hear all that Keanu Reeves, Matrix, I am Neo' kind of shit my head's going to explode." "Don't you mean Neon?" Butch shot back "Cause he reminds me of the Citgo sign." Wraths head turned "Shut the fuck up. All of you.
J.R. Ward (Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #6))
As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.
bell hooks (Killing Rage: Ending Racism)
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
Bob Black (The Abolition of Work and Other Essays)
What if I told you there are individuals in your own beloved government who actually work with al Qaeda, with ISIS, even with neo-Nazi groups that still wield power all over the world?
Jeffrey S. Stephens (Enemies Among Us (Nick Reagan, #2))
I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it Morpheus, The Matrix
Lana Wachowski (The Matrix: The Shooting Script)
No, not really. But …” Okay, I couldn’t help but gloat a little. “She likes me.” Samedi didn’t even look at me. “Well of course, you’ve had that bloody uniform on all day. I was half ready to tell you how much I liked you.
Lia Habel (Dearly, Departed (Gone With the Respiration, #1))
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.
Lana Wachowski (The Matrix: The Shooting Script)
this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting. we will fight if we are forced to but the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace. we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly. are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger. to sacrifice to end colonialism. to end neo-colonialism. to end racism. to end sexism. r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative. r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy. r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful. r/evolution means protecting the people. the plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet. r/evolution is love.
Assata Shakur
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. Morpheus, The Matrix
Lana Wachowski (The Matrix: The Shooting Script)
Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
Then I'll spread your ashes in the sea and walk into the waves.
Lancali (I Fell in Love With Hope)
Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
Morpheus
A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.
Irving Kristol (Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea)
Neo-China arrives from the future.
CCRU (Ccru: Writings 1997-2003)
I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.
Russell Kirk
You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. Morpheus, The Matrix
Lana Wachowski (The Matrix: The Shooting Script)
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
Malcolm Muggeridge
These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.
Jerry A. Coyne (Why Evolution Is True)
There is always a price to pay for badassery. Neo was a badass in the Matrix and the Matrix Reloaded, but the price he had to pay was The Matrix Revolutions.
Kevin Hearne
You're kind,' Neo said. 'Not the normal kindness that people throw around. It's a real type of kindness, the raw, thoughtful kind that comes from the heart.
Lancali (I Fell in Love With Hope)
People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
The Neo-Pagan Ten “Commandments” 1. Thou art God/dess. 2. As above, so below; as within so without. 3. Spirit abides in all things; words & names have power. 4. Maintain an attitude of gratitude (walk the talk). 5. Honor the ancestors, teachers, elders, and leaders. 6. All life is sacred. 7. All acts of love and pleasure are sacred. 8. Whatever you send out returns threefold. 9. Love is the law, love under will. 10. For the greatest good, an’ it harm none.
Marian Singer (A Witch's 10 Commandments: Magickal Guidelines for Everyday Life)
Đừng đem một nửa rất gần Đổi trao một thoáng ân cần rất xa
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
The Bonaccorso brothers are serious muscle, though if they were any dumber they’d be dumber than rocks.
A.G. Russo (Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. 2))
Một mai mở mắt nhìn ra Thấy sông đầy nước và hoa đầy đồng.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
Tôi không hiểu Khi ngoài kia gió bão Những hàng cây cũng ngả rạp cả rồi Khi sinh mệnh dễ tàn như bóng nến Sao con người vẫn bền bỉ ghét nhau?
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
Có người chỉ chờ mình nói một câu để ở lại Có người chỉ chờ một lần mình dại để bỏ đi.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
Ta với người ừ tri kỷ tạm Đàn ca một chuyến, vậy rồi đi Kẻ trú non cao nhìn gió thẳm Người xuôi sông lớn mộng kinh kỳ.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins.
Camille Paglia (Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays)
He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.
Andrew Vachss (Blue Belle (Burke, #3))
Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)
Deborah Levy (Things I Don't Want to Know)
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create... Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
Lynn Margulis
Political correctness is a war on noticing.
Steve Sailer
Yêu một người là khi Mình rất yêu người đó Dù có gọi bằng "nó" Thì cũng tại mình yêu
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.
John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization)
They can try to kill me all they want, but I'm the girl who stands on tha backs of the beasts of the NeoPacific. The Minnow blazes from within, promising life and warmth and vilainy, but out here I'm mighty.
Emily Skrutskie (The Abyss Surrounds Us (The Abyss Surrounds Us, #1))
...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced.
Michael Burawoy (Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism)
rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neo-confederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.
Kiese Laymon (Heavy)
People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people.
Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
Neo-Liberalism promised us a Global Village and gave us a Potemkin Village.
Dean Cavanagh
The equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.
Vanessa Veselka (Zazen)
I'm just a--" I looked at Yoshiro. "An unimpressive girl who doesn't want to battle ghosts and kill wraiths. There's only three things I want. To find my family. Dispel Neos. And to--" I stopped suddenly, and didn't know where to look. "Yes?" Yoshiro said. "The third thing?" "To be with me," Bennett said.
Lee Nichols (Betrayal (Haunting Emma, #2))
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
Ray Bradbury
I am not anti-American,' he said. 'I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don't like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don't like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of.
Charles Cumming (Typhoon)
As soon as you start writing, even if it is under your real name, you start to function as somebody slightly different, as a "writer". You establish from yourself to yourself continuities and a level of coherence which is not quite the same as your real life... All this ends up constituting a kind of neo-identity which is not identical to your identity as a citizen or your social identity, Besides you know this very well, since you want to protect your private life.
Michel Foucault
On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?
Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)
Welcome to the desert of the real. Morpheus, The Matrix
Lana Wachowski (The Matrix: The Shooting Script)
Có khi đau đớn quen rồi Có đau thêm nữa Cũng đã thôi bất ngờ
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
G-Men been tryin’ to snag him for years. It ain’t gonna happen. He’s smart. He’s heartless. He’s ice cold. He’s been a killer since he was twelve. He’s survived much worse than you. And, by the way, don’t think he won’t take out a few Feds if he wants to. You’re just a bunch a shitkickers to him. Who’s gonna arrest him? Huh? Cause it won’t be anyone around here. You boys need to look elsewheres for your glory and medals. That badge you got don’t mean nothin’ on these streets.
A.G. Russo (Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. 2))
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.
Morpheus
In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the Neo-Con-Artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defence, three times more for gasoline and home-heating oil and twice what we payed for health-care. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health-care, their pensions; trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war payed for with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the President's oil men are maneuvering on Iraq's oil. Borrowed money to bomb bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. No money to rebuild bridges in America. Borrowed money to start a hot war with Iran, now we have another cold war with Russia and the American economy has become a game of Russian roulette.
Dennis Kucinich
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
Thomas Nagel (Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False)
I don’t give a glance to what’s still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.
Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)
Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all fuure living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude.
Hal Foster (Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes))
Chỉ cần em nắm tay anh Bao nhiêu giông gió sẽ thành tình yêu
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
You're not done with L.A. until L.A. is done with you.
Philip Elliott (Nobody Move (Angel City #1))
The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists.
Bob Black (The Abolition of Work and Other Essays)
In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives.
Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False)
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hypermasculine assertion. Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure. It has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, whether real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishization that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification.
bell hooks (We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity)
[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.
Nick Land (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007)
But artists aren’t the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they’re often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are “sent back” to recover the territory are always those who don’t mind associating with the colored people! And it’s a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers.
bell hooks (Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism)
Personality is a piece of paper that folds in to conceal different sides and display others, like an Origami
Alejandro Colliard (The Sun, Sex, Blood and Time)
In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin!
Jun-yuan Chen
You can do anything you put your mind to doing.
Gertrude Kerschner
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....
Thomas Nagel (Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False)
My memories unveil. Of Neo, my poet bruised by people meant to protect him, my poor little boy who should’ve spent his years growing under the sun rather than under exam lights. Of Sony. My flame so determined to burn, whose mother was taken too soon and whose childhood should’ve gone on forever. Of C. My heart-broken bear of a boy, so aloof yet so gentle, so willing to be kind.
Lancali (I Fell in Love With Hope)
This is from "Marabou Stork Nightmares". Bernard's Poem: Did you see her on the telly the other day good family entertainment the tabloids say But when you're backstage at your new faeces audition you hear the same old shite of your own selfish volition She was never a singer a comic or a dancer I cant say I was sad when I found out she had cancer Great Britain's earthy northern comedy queen takes the rand, understand from the racist Boer regime So now her cells are fucked and thats just tough titty I remember her act that I caught back in Sun City She went on and on about 'them from the trees with different skull shapes from the likes of you and me' Her Neo-Nazi spell it left me fucking numb the Boers lapped it up with zeal so did the British ex-pat scum But what goes round comes round they say so welcome to another dose of chemotherapy And for my part it's time to be upfront so fuck off and die you carcinogenic cunt.
Irvine Welsh (Marabou Stork Nightmares)
Gonindu-ne-o prin cetăți închise din loc în loc, va-mpinge-o-n Iad de veci, de unde-ntâi invidia ne-o trimise. Spre-a ta scăpare cred și judec deci să-ți fiu conducător, și te voi scoate de-aici, făcând prin loc etern să treci, s-auzi cum urlă desperate gloate, să vezi și-antice duhuri osândite, ce-a doua moarte-a lor și-o strigă toate.
Dante Alighieri (Inferno)
That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.
Robert J. Sawyer (Calculating God)
Thường những người có trái tim tan vỡ Trong đám đông rất ít nhận ra nhau Sau nụ cười ấm áp trên môi họ Là những mảnh ước mơ nát vụn, u sầu. Họ học được cách giữ lòng thanh thản Trước trận mưa, con nắng; lúc buồn vui Họ tập được cách giữ hồn an tĩnh Dẫu tha nhân sao quá dễ thay dời. Họ cười mãi lúc nghe lời điêu trá Tìm loay hoay trong đó chút chân thành Họ tự nghĩ chẳng có gì vĩnh viễn Dối lừa này rồi cũng sẽ qua nhanh. Họ nhắm mắt để lần theo ánh sáng Những vì sao đang tắt lịm giữa trời Họ khép cửa để chờ nghe tiếng gõ Hay một lời đồng vọng, dẫu xa xôi. Thường những người có trái tim tan vỡ Trong đám đông rất ít nhận ra nhau Họ chẳng muốn trận buồn lây nhiễm nữa Nên một mình đóng cửa, một mình đau.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
Thomas Nagel (Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False)
The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.
Alain de Botton (Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion)
None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner’s flag are hoisted on it.
Ernst Jünger (The Forest Passage)
Hẳn cuộc đời đã làm sai gì đó Nên ít năm gặp lại, bạn khác nhiều Lòng thơ dại giờ hoài nghi tất cả Những thành trì nay cỏ mọc, tường xiêu. Hẳn cuộc đời đã làm sai gì đó Hẳn chúng mình đã rời khỏi giấc mơ Hẳn sau đó mỗi người đi mỗi ngả Chuyện hôm xưa không nhắc lại bao giờ. Hẳn là mình đã làm sai gì đó Giữa hai ta nay dâu bể, non ngàn Dẫu chỉ cách một chiếc bàn dăm tấc Mà tuyệt mù như vạn lý quan san. Ừ, cuộc đời đã làm sai gì đó Chứ tụi mình đâu hẳn có gì sai. Duyên phận lắm mới cùng đi một đoạn Còn so đo chi kể ngắn hay dài.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
For those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis. This quasi-religious function of the theory is, I think, what lies behind many of the extreme statements that you have doubtless encountered from some scientists opposing any critical analysis of neo-Darwinism in the classroom. It is also why many scientists make public statements about the theory that they would not defend privately to other scientists like me.
James A. Shapiro
Is there any way to be sure that your whole life has not been a dream? I don't think that there is. Typically we call some experiences "dreams" and others "reality" by contrasting them. Experiences that we call "real" are consistent and predictable. For example, people don't just get up and fly away in "real life" while they sometimes do in dreams. And it is not unusual for the experiences we have in dreams to jump around from one time and place to another, while those events we call "real" do not. But if your whole life has been a dream, then there is nothing to contrast these experiences with. In this case, the "dreams" that you recall each night are just dreams within the dream. And that contrast still holds. Even if your whole life has been a dream you could distinguish your nightly dreams from your "waking experiences" much of the time. But how do you know that you are not in Neo's predicament- that even your waking experiences are simply more dreams- just more predictable ones? Morpheus's suggestion seems correct. If you have never awakened from the dream to see what "real life" is actually like, you would have absolutely no way to discern that you are dreaming.
Matt Lawrence (Like a Splinter in Your Mind)
Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved.
Scott F. Gilbert
Ewww... intelligent design people! They're just buck-toothed, Bible-pushing nincompoops with community-college degrees who're trying to sell a gussied-up creationism to a cretinous public! No need to address their concerns or respond to their arguments. They are Not Science. They are poopy-heads. There. I just saved you the trouble of reading 90 percent of the responses to the ID position... This is how losers act just before they lose: arrogant, self-satisfied, too important to be bothered with substantive refutation, and disdainful of their own faults... The only remaining question is whether Darwinism will exit gracefully, or whether it will go down biting, screaming, censoring, and denouncing to the bitter end. — Tech Central Station contributor Douglas Kern, 2005
Jonathan Wells (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design)
Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality.
Sabina Magliocco (Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Contemporary Ethnography))
I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them.
Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North)
The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.
René Girard (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning)
In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call "maximising utility". The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere "externalities" to the model, with no reckoning of the cost - at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appears factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, these factors may be the most important of all.
Carne Ross (The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century)
But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their own music, clothes, and point(s) of view. It's sad and fraudulent that the kind of wholesale worship of some historical way of life has settled over so many young people, infecting them like a noxious gas... I love the dead--grew up in the thrall of Shakespeare and Hank Williams and James Dean. And I adore the Rolling Stones. But there's a difference between cherishing "Satisfaction" and wearing Keith Richards' hair while doing Keith Richards' drugs. I don't want to be Keith Richards. I wanna be me. Not--like the neo-Deadheads--just another extra in an overblown costume drama about something that wasn't that interesting the first time around.
Sarah Vowell (Radio On: A Listener's Diary)
No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: "Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture... The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.
Henry Gee (In Search of Deep Time (Comstock Books))
If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then—like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth—our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.
Lynn Margulis (Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species)
To be free one must be a slave to reason. But to be a slave to reason (the very condition of freedom) exposes one to both the revisionary power and the constructive compulsion of reason. This susceptibility is terminally amplified once the commitment to the autonomy of reason and autonomous engagement with discursive practices are sufficiently elaborated. That is to say, when the autonomy of reason is understood as the automation of reason and discursive practices—the philosophical rather than classically symbolic thesis regarding artificial general intelligence.
Reza Negarestani
Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another... Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.
Alan H. Linton
Nếu anh thấy yêu em quá khó khăn Em sẵn sàng nhường anh cho kẻ khác Người nào đó, dễ yêu hơn một chút Để anh sống cuộc đời anh thỏa thích Chả cần lo hay gắng gỏi gì nhiều. Anh đừng tin những kẻ không biết nhường nhịn ngồi phán về tình yêu Em vẫn nghĩ trên đời này Chẳng thứ gì là sẵn. Để có ga tàu, cần phải chặt hàng cây Để có ngôi nhà, cần phải biết đắp xây Để có tình yêu, cần phải biết quên mình nhiều lúc. Đâu có trái tim nào tự run Đâu có hạnh phúc nào tự mọc Tìm đâu ra một tình yêu không đòi ta phải thay đổi chút gì? Đâu có đỉnh cao nào không đánh đổi bằng gian khổ khó nguy Đâu có con tàu nào không ra khơi Mà biết yêu sự yên bình trong hải cảng. Nên nếu anh thấy yêu em là quá khó, Biển kìa anh! Em sẽ đợi anh về.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
After a while you learn…” Dịch vài đoạn trong bài thơ “After a while you learn…” của Veronica A. Shoffstall Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Sự khác nhau tinh tế giữa hai điều Một thứ là cái nắm tay thật chặt Và gông xiềng mà ngỡ đó là yêu. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Yêu không hề là dựa dẫm hoàn toàn Và nếu có một đồng hành dai dẳng Thì cũng chưa ai chắc sẽ bình an. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Hôn nhau không có nghĩa ký hợp đồng Những món quà không hề là tín vật Hôn và quà đâu có nghĩa là xong. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta chấp nhận “Mình đã thua” theo cách một quý bà Mắt thẳng nhìn, đầu ngẩng cao đĩnh đạc Chứ không như một đứa trẻ lu loa. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta biết cách Chọn ngay cho mình những nẻo yên vui Ai biết được lỡ ngày mai bất trắc Chuyện tương lai thì quá dễ thay dời. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Nắng ngoài kia dù lấp lánh niềm vui Rồi nó cũng sẽ làm mình bỏng rát Lỡ khi ta say ngủ dưới mặt trời. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta biết cách Tự trồng nên cả một mảnh vườn xinh Thay vì cứ buồn sầu chờ ai đó Hái dăm hoa rồi mang đến cho mình. Rồi sẽ đến một ngày ta hiểu được Dù lòng ta có tha thiết thế nào Người cứ vẫn lạnh lùng không cảm động Vậy thì thôi, chứ còn biết làm sao. Rồi sẽ đến một ngày ta thấu suốt Một người kia dù có tốt cách gì Cũng có lúc sẽ làm mình đau đớn Và mình cần phải học cách quên đi. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Một lần sai ôi mất cả thành trì Mối giao tình xây nhiều năm khó nhọc Chút sai lầm là có thể tan đi. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta thấu rõ Bạn bè kia không máu mủ ruột rà Nhưng họ là anh em mình có được Mà chả cần xin xỏ ở mẹ cha. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta chấp nhận Bạn đổi thay là một chuyện rất thường Ai mà chẳng có khi này khi khác Chả lẽ rồi mình đổi bạn mình luôn. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Chính ta nên là bạn tốt của mình Vì những người trên đời ta yêu nhất Chẳng bên ta trong mọi nẻo hành trình. Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Đời sống kia dẫu cay đắng thế nào Thì mình cũng chả nên hùa theo nó Mà quên đem gieo xuống chút ngọt ngào… Rồi sẽ có một ngày ta hiểu được Qua đớn đau, mình mạnh mẽ chừng nào Ta sẽ hiểu, và rồi ta sẽ hiểu Mọi chuyện đời qua những cuộc ly tao.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep. And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
...Although the term Existentialism was invented in the 20th century by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the roots of this thought go back much further in time, so much so, that this subject was mentioned even in the Old Testament. If we take, for example, the Book of Ecclesiastes, especially chapter 5, verses 15-16, we will find a strong existential sentiment there which declares, 'This too is a grievous evil: As everyone comes, so they depart, and what do they gain, since they toil for the wind?' The aforementioned book was so controversial that in the distant past there were whole disputes over whether it should be included in the Bible. But if nothing else, this book proves that Existential Thought has always had its place in the centre of human life. However, if we consider recent Existentialism, we can see it was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who launched this movement, particularly with his book Being and Nothingness, in 1943. Nevertheless, Sartre's thought was not a new one in philosophy. In fact, it goes back three hundred years and was first uttered by the French philosopher René Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode, where he asserts, 'I think, therefore I am' . It was on this Cartesian model of the isolated ego-self that Sartre built his existential consciousness, because for him, Man was brought into this world for no apparent reason and so it cannot be expected that he understand such a piece of absurdity rationally.'' '' Sir, what can you tell us about what Sartre thought regarding the unconscious mind in this respect, please?'' a charming female student sitting in the front row asked, listening keenly to every word he had to say. ''Yes, good question. Going back to Sartre's Being and Nothingness it can be seen that this philosopher shares many ideological concepts with the Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts but at the same time, Sartre was diametrically opposed to one of the fundamental foundations of psychology, which is the human unconscious. This is precisely because if Sartre were to accept the unconscious, the same subject would end up dissolving his entire thesis which revolved around what he understood as being the liberty of Man. This stems from the fact that according to Sartre, if a person accepts the unconscious mind he is also admitting that he can never be free in his choices since these choices are already pre-established inside of him. Therefore, what can clearly be seen in this argument is the fact that apparently, Sartre had no idea about how physics, especially Quantum Mechanics works, even though it was widely known in his time as seen in such works as Heisenberg's The Uncertainty Principle, where science confirmed that first of all, everything is interconnected - the direct opposite of Sartrean existential isolation - and second, that at the subatomic level, everything is undetermined and so there is nothing that is pre-established; all scientific facts that in themselves disprove the Existential Ontology of Sartre and Existentialism itself...
Anton Sammut (Paceville and Metanoia)
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
NHỮNG NGƯỜI YÊU BƯU THIẾP (Dịch bài hát Postcards Lovers – Stacey Kent, để tặng những người yêu bưu thiếp) Bỗng gần đây mình rất yêu bưu thiếp Yêu nhất là những tấm viết vu vơ Dẫu bạn có nguệch ngoạc rồi quên gửi Mình đâu nguôi háo hức đợi và chờ. Mình hình dung bạn đứng trên cầu cảng Trông tàu xa, nắng chiếu ở trên đầu Hay tẩn mẩn chọn lựa từng tấm thiếp Trước quầy hàng bao kẻ lạ chào nhau. Bạn có trải qua nhiều đêm lãng đãng Viết linh tinh trong góc quán cô đơn? Những dòng chữ thuần nhiên tràn xúc cảm Gửi cho mình mà tự sự nhiều hơn. Mình giữ cả, dẫu chẳng theo thứ tự Tháng ngày hay là nơi chốn bạn qua Đời lạ vậy, cứ như là bắt buộc Những người yêu bưu thiếp dễ đi xa Và có thể khi chúng mình gặp lại Thì rất nhiều năm tháng đã trôi qua. Bạn có tìm được đồng hành lý tưởng Trong những ngày ôi những bướm cùng hoa? Hay bạn nhớ đến cồn cào gan ruột Chốn đông vui chợt thấy bóng quê nhà? Mình đọc mãi những dòng trên bưu thiếp Từ chốn nào xa lắc của hành tinh Không tưởng nổi đời bạn giờ sao nữa Bạn thành ai sau mỗi dặm hành trình? Bưu thiếp vẫn giữ hộ mình ký ức Những chân trời xa lắm ở ngoài kia Nơi mình giấu trong tận cùng khiếp sợ Hay những nơi mình thực đã mơ về. Đời lạ vậy, cứ như là bắt buộc Những người yêu bưu thiếp dễ đi xa Và có thể khi chúng mình gặp lại Thì rất nhiều năm tháng đã trôi qua.
Nguyễn Thiên Ngân (Ôm Mỏ Neo Nằm Mộng Những Chân Trời)
What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)