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“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.”
― Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”
― John Steinbeck

“The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.”
― Amadeo Bordiga

“These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.”
― J.G. Ballard

“Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda�� by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.”
― Lester B. Pearson

“The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page.”
― Frank Harris, My Life and Loves

“I have decided never to love again. For one thing, it is very painful to love and lose, and on top of that, falling in love again would be the biggest folly, I think.”
― Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Devdas

“Yet the greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“It is a great age to live in and, if need be, die in and for. Any magician worth his salt would tell you the same.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Yugoslavya ve Arnavutluk'ta diktatör rejimleri iktidardaydı; Yunanistan'daki General Metalaş ve Bulgaristan'da Kimon Georgiev diktatörleri; Amiral Miklos Horthy'nin Macaristan'daki rejimi, Portekiz'deki askeri hükümet ve Romanya'da bir monarşik otoriterlik biçimi vardı. Dolayısıyla Almanya, Avrupa faşizminin en uç örneği haline gelmesine rağmen, bu durum bir modaydı, bir Alman buluşu değildi. Demokrasiler sonunda Batı Avrupa'da zafer kazandığı için savaşlar arası bir perspektiften bakıldığında demokrasilerin tuhaf olanlar olduklarını unutmak kolaydır.”
― Andrew Marr, A History of the World

“Yugoslavya ve Arnavutluk'ta diktatör rejimleri iktidardaydı; Yunanistan'daki General Metaxas ve Bulgaristan'da Kimon Georgiev diktatörleri; Amiral Miklos Horthy'nin Macaristan'daki rejimi, Portekiz'deki askeri hükümet ve Romanya'da bir monarşik otoriterlik biçimi vardı. Dolayısıyla Almanya, Avrupa faşizminin en uç örneği haline gelmesine rağmen, bu durum bir modaydı, bir Alman buluşu değildi. Demokrasiler sonunda Batı Avrupa'da zafer kazandığı için savaşlar arası bir perspektiften bakıldığında demokrasilerin tuhaf olanlar olduklarını unutmak kolaydır.”
― Andrew Marr, A History of the World

“[...]demokrasi bir sistem değildir. Bir kültürdür. Alışkanlık, uzun süredir var olan güç ayrımları, hukuka olan inanç ve yolsuzluk ile kinikliğin olmadığı bir sisteme dayanır. Bu sistemi ithal edip, kurabilir, sonra da çalıştırabilirsiniz. Ama bir kültürü ithal edemezsiniz. Bu, dünyanın çoğunun tiranlar veya kleptokrasiler altında yaşamaya mahkûm olduğu anlamına gelmiyor. Bu, sadece demokratların oyunun sonunu duyurmaları için biraz erken olduğu demek.”
― Andrew Marr, A History of the World

“The 1920s, ��30s, and early ��40s were a time of rising nationalism coupled with technology-driven angst and revulsion at governments that appeared to be both corrupt and relics of an earlier age. The widespread questioning and tottering of faith caused prospective Fascist leaders to test their training wheels and spurred movements and fads of every description, from mysticism and belief in fairies to flagpole-sitting and a flirtation across the political spectrum with eugenics and its accompanying racial theories.

Mussolini’s early success energized those whose primary fear was Bolshevism or what they imagined to be Bolshevism: loud demands for higher wages, for example, or campaigns for land reform. In virtually every country, there were veterans who—regardless of which side they had fought on during the war—were contemptuous of civilian politicians. Anti-Semitism, whether casual or visceral, flourished in politics, the professions, academia, and the arts. The bewildering rush of globalization prompted many to find solace in the familiar rhythms of nation, culture, and faith; and people everywhere seemed to be on the lookout for leaders who claimed to have simple and satisfying answers to modernity’s tangled questions.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“Зло 19-го века было злом, еще знавшим о своей противоположности добру. Зло же 20-го века этой противоположности не знает. Типичные люди 20-го века мнят себя, по Ницше, «по ту сторону добра и зла». Это совсем особые люди, бесскорбные и не способные к раскаянию. Думается, что их «великие дела», даже если бы они и породили какие-нибудь положительные результаты, никогда не преобразятся в памяти «благодарного» потомства в светлые подвиги. А впрочем, как знать? Еще неизвестно, какими людьми будут наши потомки.”
― Федор Степун, Бывшее и несбывшееся

“The birth of the 20th century was like a flaming sunrise. More was expected of the century than any other. So much had been achieved in the previous one that it seemed sensible to expect that henceforth the world's triumphs would far outweigh the disasters.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the Twentieth Century

“The rush of events in the Soviet Union, Germany, eastern Europe and China in the late 1980s and the very early 1990s had no parallel in modern history. During the last thousand years no other formidable empire in a time of comparative peace had been dissolved so quickly, so unexpectedly, as the Soviet Union.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the Twentieth Century

“The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question �� did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill �� will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the Twentieth Century

“It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all—every one of us—take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations

“The big social utopias—Communism, Fascism—have led to incredible disasters. Overpopulation of our planet. You just name it. Destruction of what nature is. All of that started in the 20th century... I do believe that the 20th century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”
― Werner Herzog

“The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
― Claude Debussy

“I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
― Claude Debussy

“I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me

“The maid sashayed coyly, while the general tore off her cheongsam. Buttons flew everywhere, clinking against the antique vases filling the room like the sound of jade chimes. He lifted her onto the table, ignoring her muffled protests and kicking legs. Just as he was about to indulge in their game, there was a knock at the door. "Knock, knock, knock."
General Li shouted:
- What is it?
- “Sir, Manager Zhao requests an audience��,”
― Tedatom

“Those pearl-white flowers swayed their heads by the feet of Lord Shakyamuni; and from their golden centres wafted unceasingly a wondrous fragrance surpassing all description. It must have been noon in Paradise.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Murder in the Age of Enlightenment: Essential Stories

“I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt