Smouldering Charcoal Quotes

Ill-humoured reflections. - It is with men as with the charcoal-kilns in the forest. Only when the young have ceased to glow and are carbonized do they become useful. As long as they are smoking and smouldering they may perhaps be more interesting but they are of no use and all too often unmanageable. - Mankind mercilessly employs every individual as material for heating its great machines: but what then is the purpose of the machines if all individuals (that is to say mankind) are of no other use than as material for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in themselves - is that the umana commedia?

Injustice cannot destroy, it merely seeks to reproduce itself, until those who have been wronged by it, starved because of it, gone mad because of it, been crippled in body and maimed in spirit because of it, stand up and fight.

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread.