Travesty Quotes

How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

I’ve lived through some injustices in the last couple of centuries. Seen some fucking travesties. But one of the biggest, Oraya, is that anyone taught you that you should become anything other than exactly what you are.

Ed, it was everything, those nights on the phone, everything we said until late became later and then later and very late and finally to go to bed with my ear warm and worn and red from holding the phone close close close so as not to miss a word of what it was, because who cared how tired I was in the humdrum slave drive of our days without each other. I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did. But that’s why right there it was doomed. We couldn’t only have the magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don’t overlap, their loyal friends who don’t get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that's why we broke up.

He hasn't even eaten at Olive Garden, so I doubt he's a connoisseur of hotels." - Kat "No Olive Garden? Man, we've got to get that boy some endless breadsticks and salad. Travesty." - Daemon

Our lives are mere flashes of light in an infinitely empty universe. In 12 years of education the most important lesson I have learned is that what we see as “normal” living is truly a travesty of our potential. In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything anything in the “real world”. Refuse normalcy. Beauty is everywhere, love is endless, and joy bleeds from our everyday existence. Embrace it. I love all of you, all my friends, family, and community. I am ceaselessly grateful from the bottom of my heart for everyone. The only thing I can ask of you is to stay free of materialism. Remember that every day contains a universe of potential; exhaust it. Live and love so immensely that when death comes there is nothing left for him to take. Wealth is love, music, sports, learning, family and freedom. Above all, stay gold.

It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single - which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.

In which year did a Harvard sculler last outrow an Oxford man at Henley?" Langdon had no idea, but he could imagine only one reason the question had been asked. "Surely such a travesty has never occurred.

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet ... AM has won, simply ... he has taken his revenge ... I have no mouth. And I must scream.

[James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....

We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

He’s been to rehab, which is a travesty; you can tell by his smug face that he’s not capable of genuine addiction.

Valentine clears his throat. "So. Why can't you just say it?" "Say what?" "You know what." "It's hardly the time or place." "It is if you're dying." "I can't." "You're a dick. Just fucking say it!" "I can't! I'm... English." "What am I, a Martian? I say it all the time. I know you love me, why can't you say it?" "If you know, then why do I have to?" "You're missing the point a bit." "I took your bullet, you little twat, don't you dare question whether I love you." "Yeah, but you could say it." The throb of the gunshots is pounding all down his arm and body. The pain's so bad he wants to cry, like he's five and he's skinned his knee coming off his bike. "Je t'aime," he says, through gritted teeth, to shut the kid up. "Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Tu es... complètement bête, tu t'habilles comme une pute travestie, je hais ta musique, tu es fou, tu me rends fou, mais je suis fou de toi et je pense à toi tout le temps et je t'aime, oui. Tu comprends? Je t'aime. Seulement... pas en anglais. Je ne peux pas." Valentine's shifting about like he's uncomfortable. "I ain't got no idea what you just said but I think I need to change my pants." "Maintenant, ta gueule.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

A las travestis no nos nombra nadie, salvo nosotras. El resto de la gente ignora nuestros nombres, usa el miso para todas: putos.

In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder.

It is a greater travesty by far to see the innocent punished than to watch the guilty go free.

Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.

Así fuimos olvidando lo importante: que ser travesti era una fiesta. Porque la más hermosa de todas nosotras ya no estaba ahí para recordárnoslo.

I think, This will be the last horrible thing I have to go through, until I meet someone else and the whole travesty begins again. I myself bear a sign that reads DON´T DATE ME, I CHAIN-SMOKE, I´M BITTER, AND I INCLUDE GRABBY TODDLER, and this has dramatically decreased my social life. I have resigned myself to a lifetime of jalapeño poppers and cheap wine and Frasier reruns.

Many people experience the travesty of regret in their end days; the realization that nothing held them back, that nothing was in their way, that there is no one to blame, only themselves. Don't just sit by waiting for your life to happen, make it happen! Don’t just hope your dreams will come alive, breathe life into them! Don't let your fear help you birth a well-nourished regret, take action today! At the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of your life, live in such a manner that you can hold your head up high, smile, and be proud of a life well lived.

I left for home later dispirited by the thought that my life was infinitely preferable to almost every other human who had ever lived on this planet. I lived in a country where most individuals were free to shape any life for themselves without state intimidation or improper imprisonment; in a time when most of the travesties of human interaction caused by ignorance had been removed. I had adequate money and my health was generally good. I worked at something I loved and if the working conditions ever became unbearable I was able to move without fear of destitution. I had enough or even an excess of food from all continents, all climates. And I was still a miserable bastard.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people.

How can you and I connect commune collaborate in any real way if much of the space between us is hidden or that social travesty called "white lies"?

How can you and I connect commune collaborate in any real way if much of the space between us is hidden or that social travesty called 'white lies'?

The eighties are a sorely underrated decade in terms of musical composition. They don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. I try to use my platform in the world to bring attention to this travesty by singing eighties ballads whenever I get the chance.

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

War is capitalism with the gloves off

What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

A travesty of epic proportions,” Tock agreed. “How much you wanna bet they couldn’t even turn the computer on?

Hiçbir travesti bir ev kadını olmak için giymez eteği. Amaç en güzel kadın olmaktır...

a travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day.

El cielo de las travestis debe ser hermoso como los paisajes deslumbrantes del recuerdo, un lugar donde pasar la eternidad sin aburrirse.

When they approached, she had figured out something that had been like a splinter in her foot: the easy thing to believe was that toubab were monsters, their crimes exceptional. Harder, however, and even more frightening was the truth: there was no such thing as monsters. Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place.

This is why we can’t leave the making of laws to men. They result in travesties of injustice that unfairly burden the poor. And women. Those high and mighty aristocrats, in their black robes and powdered wigs—they have no idea.

malade malade c’est sûr, je déteste ceux qui ne le sont pas

How ghastly for her,” said Alexia, driven beyond endurance into comment. “People actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

Life on earth is far too short, and we were each created with such notable talents that it’d be a travesty to while them away on work we don’t love.

the Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan.

Zach’s shirtless in my hotel room, which is both amazing, and a travesty on multiple levels. Essentially, I’m doing my very best not to stare. And it’s, uh, hard.

I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times- even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it.

I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did. But that’s why right there it was doomed. We couldn’t only have the magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don’t overlap, their loyal friends who don’t get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that's why we broke up.

Si alguien quisiera hacer una lectura de nuestra patria, de esta patria por la que hemos jurado morir en cada himno cantado en los patios de la escuela, esta patria que se ha llevado vidas de jóvenes en sus guerras, esta patria que ha enterrado gente en campos de concentración, si alguien quisiera hacer un registro exacto de esa mierda, entonces debería ver el cuerpo de La Tía Encarna. Eso somos como país también, el daño sin tregua al cuerpo de las travestis. La huella dejada en determinados cuerpos, de manera injusta, azarosa y evitable, esa huella de odio.

WHERE DOES THIS TRAVESTY TAKE PLACE? HO. HO. HO. Albert gave up. “Well, Crumley’s in The Maul, for one. Very popular, the Hogfather Grotto. They always have a good Hogfather, apparently.” LET’S GET THERE AND SLEIGH THEM. HO. HO. HO. “Right you are, master.” THAT WAS A PUNE OR PLAY ON WORDS, ALBERT. I DON’T KNOW IF YOU NOTICED. “I’m laughing like hell deep down, sir.” HO. HO. HO.

The way that some guys kiss their long-term girlfriends or wives is an absolute travesty. A kiss should never be routine, like saying hello or good-bye. Kissing the person you love should be sign language for the soul. It should say I love you, I need you, and I’m happy to see you or sorry to see you go. If you can’t kiss like that, you should really keep your fucking lips to yourself” Excerpt From: Prescott, R.J. “The Aftermath.” Forever, 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

There is something wrong with this world." She stood like she was making a speech. "Something very wrong when it's the twenty-first century and this type of elitist travesty is still being perpetuated.

That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.

Her laugh was a travesty. Which made sense because in a way, so was his apology. But what was he supposed to say? I want you until I hurt. Until I sweat. I love you with a raw, bleeding need that I've never understood. And all I know for sure is that you can never be mine.

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.*

The position I now favor is that economics is a pre-science, rather like astronomy before Copernicus, Brahe and Galileo. I still hold out hope of better behavior in the future, but given the travesties of logic and anti-empiricism that have been committed in its name, it would be an insult to the other sciences to give economics even a tentative membership of that field.1

The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt means if he probably did it, then let’s get him off the streets.

I do. Let’s cut the shit and stop pretending that we’re strangers. You never belonged with Reed, Little Tiger. He is domesticated. You are wild. To tame you would be a travesty. The sooner you get that, the sooner you can move on.

There was a time when a bank was a bank. But now there are evidently “cashless” banks, banks without any money, which is surely something of a travesty? It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.

As a concerned friend, I really ought to check on her emotional state.” “How ghastly for her,” said Alexia, driven beyond endurance into comment. “People actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but in today’s America the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.

...It was everything, those nights on the phone, everything we said until late became later & then later & very late & finally to go to bed with my ear warm & worn & red from holding the phone close, close, close so as not to miss a word of what it was, because who cared how tired I was in the humdrum slave drive of our days without each other? I'd ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you & I did. But that's why right there it was doomed. We couldn't only have the magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don't overlap, their loyal friends who don't get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight & that's why we broke up.

Hear ye Hear ye.... ah, fuck it. We're here today for bullshit and we all know it. So let's dispense with the usual formality and get on with this witch hunt before I lose what little grip I still have on my patience. So, Dare Kattalakis state your case and demands to the council. And do it fast, with as few words as possible." Savitar "First, I want to restate what a travesty it is that my family's seat is taken by--" "Wah, wah, wah ... quit crying at the tit. Your brother Vane is the head of the Arcadians and Fury leads the Katagaria. Seek a therapist who gives a shit, or if you'd like to challenge either of them for their position, we can do with some entertainment. Hell, I'll make popcorn for the show. Otherwise, Bitch, get on with it." Savitar

As a society, we adhere to the belief in a fair trial for a person accused of a serious crime, but some of us struggle when it comes to the business of providing a competent lawyer to guarantee said fair trial. Lawyers like me live with the question “But how do you represent such scum?” I offer a quick “Someone has to” as I walk away. Do we really want fair trials? No, we do not. We want justice, and quickly. And justice is whatever we deem it to be on a case-by-case basis. It’s just as well that we don’t believe in fair trials because we damned sure don’t have them. The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt means if he probably did it, then let’s get him off the streets.

Then this travesty of manhood reascended to his feet, and said, whether speaking to me or to himself I could not tell,

One of the great travesties of life is finding out porn is unrealistic.

The goatee was a neutral—unless you assessed it on style. In which case the fucker was a travesty of Rogaine proportions.

I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. For other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness, and for myself, I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality.

I'd ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did. But that's why right there it was doomed. We couldn't only have the magic nights buzzing though the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don't overlap, their loyal friends who don't get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that's why we broke up.

When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it. People around you expect you to fail, and you learn to expect it from yourself, to see it as almost comforting in its familiarity. You begin to believe you are destined to make a mess of things. But then there are those unexpected kindnesses, those moments when someone does something to make you believe that perhaps you are more than the sum of everything you have done wrong, that perhaps you are worth more than you think.

I'm not simple. Loving me will never be easy. I bring every travesty that's rocked me- with me, to the table. I won't pretend to be something I'm not, and I don't expect you to be blemish free either. That's much too boring of an existence. A past means you've lived, you've prevailed. My ears are open. My heart is accepting. I want to know how you are. I want to know what made you... and I want to feel free to share the 'not so pretty' parts of me, with you.

What's not to like about you? Sure, you have more sarcasm per square inch than any other mammal.

Singur în odaia încinsă, poți coborî în fine în lumea ta, în adevărul tău, în tot ce există adânc și enigmatic în tine, dacă ești în stare să-ntâmpini cu același curaj abjectia și sublimul, dezastrul și mântuirea, arhanghelul și estropiatul...

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer...

My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.

He bit his lip, feeling guilty for looking at her tits. He imagined ripping the bra's flimsy material , it was a travesty to cover those beauties. He loved burying his cock between her tits, using them to sandwich it as he rubbed himself to orgasm, giving her the only pearl necklace he could afford.~ Dante

When The Journal of Words compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that Pride and Prejudice was number twelve?" She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. "And do you know where Jane Eyre was?" she asked. She looked at the four of them in turn, but nobody answered her. "Number fifty-two!" she shrieked. "Fifty-two! Below that pornographic travesty Lolita!" She spat the title as if it were poison. "Below Huckleberry Finn! Below Ulysses. Have you ever tried to read Ulysses? Have you ever finished it? No, you haven't. No one has. They just carry it around and lie about having read it.

Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

He was smiling. It was one of those sincere smiles grown-ups give kids when they’re trying to get them in arm’s reach for something bad. Doctors smile that way right before they give you a shot; teachers look the same just before they tell you they found out what you did. The Big Bad Wolf probably smiled at Red Riding Hood like that when he was pretending to be her grandma. Despite all my mother’s flaws including her mean streak, I never once saw that travesty of an expression on her face.

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society.

As fi vrut sa pastrez doar creierul primitiv, sa ma topesc de dragoste si sa ma invinetesc de ura, sa salivez, sa gafai, sa tusesc, sa stranut, sa sughit, sa-mi bata inima si sa-mi filtrez sangele prin rinichi si sa-mi omor microbii in limfa, totul impreuna cu toti, cu grupul, cu gasca sau cu familia sau cu neamul sau cu specia sau cu lumea vie sau cu Dumnezeirea, doar sa nu mai traiesc schizofrenia gandirii, acest mizerabil pseudonim pentru singuratate.

This was the trouble with Dylan. Friendly Dylan would lull you into a false sense of complacency, then crazy-hot Dylan would club you over the head and drag you off before you even noticed anything had changed.

the principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread of oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the Almighty, the Possessor of all power in heaven and earth, so that none can defeat His counsels, thwart His purpose, or resist His will (Ps. 115:3). To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is "The Governor among the nations" (Ps. 22:28), setting up kingdoms, overthrowing empires, and determining the course of dynasties as pleaseth Him best. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the "Only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords" (1 Tim. 6:15). Such is the God of the Bible. How different is the God of the Bible from the God of modern Christendom! The conception of Deity which prevails most widely today, even among those who profess to give heed to the Scriptures, is a miserable caricature, a blasphemous travesty of the Truth. The God of the twentieth century is a helpless, effeminate being who commands the respect of no really thoughtful man. The God of the popular mind is the creation of a maudlin sentimentality. The God of many a present-day pulpit is an object of pity rather than of awe-inspiring reverence.[1]

I also wrote them about you.” His blue gaze bored into her with paralyzing force. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t flee. Could only stare at the social travesty of his ungroomed features—the scruffy half beard shadowing his jaw, the too-long hair falling over his forehead—and feel her heart beat with love for this unconventional man. Darius’s grip softened on her wrist until his fingers were tracing tiny circles over the sensitive skin. “I told them that I had met a woman who wasn’t afraid to stand toe-to-toe with me. A woman who had seen my flaws and learned my darkest secrets, yet didn’t immediately run for the hills.” His self-deprecating chuckle coaxed a reluctant smile from her, the sound soothing the sharp edges of her turmoil. “I told them how this woman seemed instinctively to know when to comfort and when to confront, and how I was better with her in my life than I’d ever been on my own.

Nature knows nothing about right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain; she simply acts. She creates a beautiful woman, and places a cancer on her cheek. She may create an idealist, and kill him with a germ. She creates a fine mind, and then burdens it with a deformed body. And she will create a fine body, apparently for no use whatever. She may destroy the most wonderful life when its work has just commenced. She may scatter tubercular germs broadcast throughout the world. She seemingly works with no method, plan or purpose. She knows no mercy nor goodness. Nothing is so cruel and abandoned as Nature. To call her tender or charitable is a travesty upon words and a stultification of intellect. No one can suggest these obvious facts without being told that he is not competent to judge Nature and the God behind Nature. If we must not judge God as evil, then we cannot judge God as good. In all the other affairs of life, man never hesitates to classify and judge, but when it comes to passing on life, and the responsibility of life, he is told that it must be good, although the opinion beggars reason and intelligence and is a denial of both. Emotionally, I shall no doubt act as others do to the last moment of my existence. With my last breath I shall probably try to draw another, but, intellectually, I am satisfied that life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on some one else.

Subvert the social and civil order! Aye, I would destroy, to the last vestige, this mockery of order, this travesty upon justice! Break up the home? Yes, every home that rests on slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf; every law, every statute, every be-it-enacted that represents tyranny; everything you call American privilege that can only exist at the expense of international right. Now cry out, "Nihilist-disintegrationist !" Say that I would isolate humanity, reduce society to its elemental state, make men savage! It is not true. But rather than see this devastating, cankering, enslaving system you call social order go on, rather than help to keep alive the accursed institutions of Authority, I would help to reduce every fabric in the social structure to its native element.

Ultimately this is not merely about dreary yet didactic statistics but, as Dr. Williams insisted, it is about morality. The devastating consequences of wealth redistribution, intergenerational thievery, massive federal spending, endless borrowing, and unimaginable debt accumulation on American society, and most particularly on the ruling generation and future generations, are a travesty. Stealing from the future does not establish the utopia promised by the statists. It is the rising generation’s grave moral failure.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

But oh, my dear one," he pleaded, "death is afar off from you." "Nay," she said, holding up a warning hand. "I am deeper in death at this moment than if the weight of an earthly grave lay heavy upon me!" "Oh, my wife, must I read it?" he said, before he began. "It would comfort me, my husband!" was all she said, and he began to read when she had got the book ready. How can I, how could anyone, tell of that strange scene, its solemnity, its gloom, its sadness, its horror, and withal, its sweetness. Even a sceptic, who can see nothing but a travesty of bitter truth in anything holy or emotional, would have been melted to the heart had he seen that little group of loving and devoted friends kneeling round that stricken and sorrowing lady; or heard the tender passion of her husband's voice, as in tones so broken and emotional that often he had to pause, he read the simple and beautiful service from the Burial of the Dead. I cannot go on… words… and v-voices… f-fail m-me! She was right in her instinct. Strange as it was, bizarre as it may hereafter seem even to us who felt its potent influence at the time, it comforted us much. And the silence, which showed Mrs. Harker's coming relapse from her freedom of soul, did not seem so full of despair to any of us as we had dreaded.

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines the human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It's not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

She strong-armed the swinging door and walked through. Straight into an acid flashback. Clara’s first reaction was to laugh. She stood stunned for a moment then started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh until she thought she’d piddle. Peter was soon infected and began laughing. And Gamache, who up until this moment had only seen a travesty, smiled, then chuckled, then laughed and within moments was laughing so hard he had to wipe away tears. ‘Holy horrible taste, Batman,’ said Clara to Peter who doubled over, laughing some more. ‘Solid, man, solid,’ he gasped and managed to raise a peace sign before having to put both hands on his knees to support his heaving body.

Ideally, a fair and equitable society would regulate debt in line with the ability to be paid without pushing economies into depression. But when shrinking markets deepen fiscal deficits, creditors demand that governments balance their budgets by selling public monopolies. Once the land, water and mineral rights are privatized, along with transportation, communications, lotteries and other monopolies, the next aim is to block governments from regulating their prices or taxing financial and rentier wealth. The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend. Taken together, these policies create a one-sided freedom for rentiers to create a travesty of the classical “Adam Smith” view of free markets. It is a freedom to reduce the indebted majority to a state of deepening dependency, and to gain wealth by stripping public assets built up over the centuries.

The eighties are a sorely underrated decade in terms of musical composition. They don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. I try to use my platform in the world to bring attention to this travesty by singing eighties ballads whenever I get the chance. Like right now, as I sing “What About Me” by Moving Pictures on the karaoke stage. It was their one-hit wonder and a soul-stirring exercise in self-pity. My eyes are closed as I belt out the lyrics and sway behind he microphone. Not in time to the music—I’m so pissed, I’m lucky to still be standing at all. Usually I play the guitar too, but my fine-motor functions fell by the wayside hours ago. I’m a fantastic musician—not that anyone really notices. That talent gets lost in the shadow of the titles, the same way the talented offspring of two accomplished stars get discounted by the weight of their household name. My mother gave me my love of music—she played several instruments. I had tutors, first for the piano, then the violin—but it was the guitar that really stuck with me. The karaoke stage at The Goat used to be my second home and in the last few hours, I’ve given serious consideration to moving in beneath it. If Harry Potter was the Boy Under the Stairs, I could be the Prince Under the Stage. Why the fuck not?

Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb ik thuis ook, als ik door de WC-deur heen probeer te praten met mijn vriendin. Het onzegbare, dat roeren wij thuis door de muesli. Ik wil poëzie die me meeneemt naar een wereld die ik nog niet ken, naar een inzicht dat ik nog niet had, naar een uitzicht dat ik nergens anders had kunnen vinden. Ik wil een gedicht dat zo goed is, dat ik bijna vergeet dat het, zoals elk gedicht, een taalbouwsel is – een volmaakt bedrieglijke travestie waar het grote niets doorheen schijnt, een van zijn eigen leugenachtigheid getuigende leugen van inkt. Ik wil een gedicht als een huis, dat me op één steen na laat geloven dat ik er werkelijk in zou kunnen wonen.

He was worried about his country. Something was rotting from the inside—a slow decay of what was right and wrong. It was as if hundreds of cynical little rats were chewing at its very fiber, gnawing away year by year, until it was collapsing into a vat of gray slime and self-loathing. It had oozed under the doors of the classrooms, the newscasts, and in the movies and television shows and had slowly changed the national dialogue until it was now a travesty to be proud of your country, foolish to be patriotic, and insensitive to even suggest that people take care of themselves. History was being rewritten by the hour, heroes pulled down to please the political correctors. We were living in a country where there was freedom of speech for some, but not all. What was it going to take to get America back on track? Would everything they had fought for be forgotten? He was so glad he and Norma had grown up when they had. They had come of age in such an innocent time, when people wanted to work and better themselves. Now the land of the free meant an entirely different thing. Each generation had become a weaker version of the last, until we were fast becoming a nation of whiners and people looking for a free ride—even expecting it. Hell, kids wouldn’t even leave home anymore. He felt like everything was going downhill.

Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.

It is religion which has ordered men to bow down before God, where once man rose up in joyful outreach. It is religion which has burdened man with worries about God’s wrath, where once man sought God to lighten his burden! It is religion which told man to be ashamed of his body and its most natural functions, where once man celebrated those functions as the greatest gifts of life! It is religion which taught you that you must have an intermediary in order to reach God, where once you thought yourself to be reaching God by the simple living of your life in goodness and in truth. And it is religion which commanded humans to adore God, where once humans adored God because it was impossible not to! Everywhere religion has gone it has created disunity—which is the opposite of God. Religion has separated man from God, man from man, man from woman—some religions actually telling man that he is above woman, even as it claims God is above man—thus setting the stage for the greatest travesties ever foisted upon half the human race.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

The birds do not sing, clouds remain of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything.

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious and desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together so that the assumption of external antisemitism would even imply an external guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred—and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had by-passed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.