Reading – Revolution
READING
Someone was asked at a party, ‘Have you read the new book by X?’ and answered, ‘I have, yes, but not personally.’
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. [William Hazlitt]
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. [Jorge Luis Borges]
No two persons ever read the same book. [Edmund Wilson]
It is Beckett’s wonderful rhythms, the way he weighs his words, the authority he gives to each, their measured pace, the silences he puts between them, as loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; it is the contrapuntal form, the reduced means, the simple clear directness of his obscurities, and the depth inside of every sentence, the graceful hurdle of every chosen obstacle, everywhere the lack of waste…
It is not simply a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings; but the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness, as constructions whose purpose it is to create conceptual perceptions – blue in every area and range: emotion moving through the space of the imagination, the mind at gleeful hop and scotch, qualities, through the arrangements of relations, which seem alive within the limits they pale and redden like spanked cheeks, and thus the bodies, objects, happenings, they essentially define…
When Leo Feldman, Stanley Elkin’s awesome merchant, enters his department store and is at once assailed by ‘perfumes and facepowders, the mascaras, and polishes bright as sodas,’ will we enter? only if his language enters us the way God’s did Adam at whose bare word, as Sir Thomas Browne reminds us, were the rest of the creatures made. Then the language fills the mouth as it was meant to. We feel the need to speak it. Accepting the words as our own, we believe at last in their denotations. ‘Art, art, thought Feldman, impresario of deep disks of rich rouge, pastels as flesh, of fine-grained dusting powders like soft, fantastic sand, of big plush puffs and cunning brushes.’ This silent head-hummed sound we make is not a useless and annoying wail which has been wrenched by lack of oil from the machinery. When we hear ‘big plush puffs’ we do not have to see them, and ‘deep disks of rouge’ replace the feel of the tinted grease. Through the physical qualities of the language Elkin moves his ‘things’ as if to music… Feldman’s passion for his goods is instantly convincing because Elkin’s passion for the language which relates it is convincing. What the eye dwells on – loves – the ear hears. [William Gass]
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. [Samuel Johnson]
I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind. [Georg Lichtenberg]
A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades; who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one’s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré? It is pleasanter to have the entrée to Balzac’s society than to receive cards from all the duchesses of Mayfair. [Oscar Wilde]
Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written. [Yevgeny Zamyatin]
I recall certain readings in my childhood, so voluptuously penetrating that I felt the sentence almost physically enter my heart. [André Gide]
The Talmud warns against reading Scripture by so inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of your own countenance. [Harold Bloom]
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. [Oscar Wilde]
Look at you! Sitting by the fire every evening with your nose in a book. Why aren’t you down the disco, staying out all night with the lads, coming home drugged, drunk and dishevelled like any normal teenager? Sometimes I wonder where your mother and I went wrong. [Anon. to his daughter]
My husband’s taste in reading is very stunted. I feel for him sometimes. He reads books on wood-turning. I don’t know how he survives. [Anon.]
Silverfish, which have a high carbohydrate diet, feed on the cellulose of paper and the starch paste and size that binds it. The end result: the book falls apart in your hands. Humble booklice feast on bookmould, while upmarket firebrats are partial to the paper glaze of coffee table tomes. The recent publishing fad for mimsey illustrated publications about herbs and posies, with lemon grass or violet scented endpapers, merely adds piquancy to the insect banquet. Carpet beetles litter literature with variously coloured turds according to the part of the book they’ve been chewing on: snow white if blank endpapers have been the meal, but black in the case of printed text, and light brown after swallowing glue. Browsers and spoilers such as the universally loathed cockroach live in the space between books and walls, fouling the page ends with evil-smelling saliva. The brown stains on those fetid pages are the tiny corpses of thrips. Even the bookshelves are subject to determined erosion by woodworms, ticking death-watch beetles and those bibliophagic superbugs, termites, who can dessicate not only books, shelves and floors but the whole library building, foundations and all. [Ian Breakwell]
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you cannot expect an apostle to look out. [Georg Lichtenberg]
It was Barrès who made it fashionable. That need of looking for a lesson, a ‘message’ everywhere and constantly is intolerable to me. Vassalage that debases the mind. Great works do not so much teach us as they plunge us into a sort of almost loving bewilderment. I compare those who are everywhere seeking their advantage to those prostitutes who, before giving themselves, ask: ‘How much is your little gift? [André Gide]
With the impressive erudition of those great pundits, I sometimes say to myself: ‘Ah, how little they must have had to think about, to have been able to read so much!” Even when it is reported of the elder Pliny that he was always reading or being read to, at table, when travelling, or in his bath, the question that suggests itself to me whether the man was so lacking in ideas of his own that those of others had to be incessantly imparted to him, just as a consommé is given to a man suffering from consumption in order to keep him alive. Neither his undiscerning gullibility, nor his inexpressibly repulsive, almost unintelligible, paper-saving, notebook style is calculated to give me a high opinion of his ability to think for himself. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
In anything fit to be called the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves. [Robert Louis Stevenson]
Desultory reading has always been my greatest pleasure. [Georg Lichtenberg]
In music we have pieces which demand more talent in the performer than in the composer. Why should there not come a period when the art of writing poetry stands lower than the art of reading it? Of course rival readings would then cease to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and become more and less brilliant ‘performances.’ [C.S. Lewis]
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. [Henry David Thoreau]
But what does the phenomenological attitude advise? It asks us to produce within ourselves a reading pride that will give us the illusion of participating in the work of the author of the book. Such an attitude could hardly be achieved on first reading. But every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading… give us, little by little, the solution of this problem. Imperceptibly, we give ourselves the illusion that both the problem and the solution are ours. The psychological nuance: ‘I should have written that,’ establishes us as phenomenologists of reading. [Gaston Bachelard]
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. [Ray Bradbury]
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming. [Arthur James Balfour]
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. [Gaston Bachelard]
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. [G.K. Chesterton]
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms. [Angela Carter]
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. [Erasmus]
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight. [Charles de Montesquieu]
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book. [Stephane Mallarmé]
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books, is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. [H.L. Mencken]
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
A book like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento. It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am still a philologist. Still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:- in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste – a malicious taste, perhaps? – no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which demands of its notaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow – it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book:- this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches how to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers… My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! – [Friedrich Nietzsche]
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. [Henry David Thoreau]
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. [L.P. Smith]
There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter. [Mortimer Adler]
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. [Albert Camus]
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. [Kafka]
If you wish to preserve the spirit of a dead author, you must not skin him, stuff him, and set him up in a case. You must eat him, digest him, and let him live in you, with such life as you have, for better or worse. [Samuel Butler]
As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader’s pride mixed in with much enthusiasm. But whereas pride usually develops into a massive sentiment that weighs upon the entire psyche, the touch of pride that is born of adherence to the felicity of an image, remains secret and unobtrusive. it is within us, mere readers that we are, it is for us, and for us alone. It is a homely form of pride. Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer. When the page we have just read is near perfection, our modesty suppresses this desire. But it reappears, nevertheless. In any case, every reader who re-reads a work he likes, know that its pages concern him… In his admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. [Gaston Bachelard]
A certain work, for example, is the outcome of long effort; it embodies innumerable trials, fresh starts, a long process of elimination and selection. It has required months or years of reflection, and it may have drawn upon the experience and acquirements of a whole lifetime. But the effect of this work makes itself felt in a few moments. At a glance we can take in an imposing monument of architecture, feel the impact of it. In two hours all the calculations of the dramatic poet, all the labour he has put into organising his play, into shaping his lines, one by one; all the composer’s combination of harmony and orchestration; or all the philosopher’s meditations, the years during which he held his ideas in check, waiting until he could discern and accept their final order; all these acts of faith and choice, all these mental transactions converge at last in the finished work, to strike, astonish, dazzle, or disconcert the mind of Another, who is suddenly subjected to this enormous charge of intellectual effort. It is an incommensurable act. [Paul Valéry]
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well. (Daniel J. Boorstin)
No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. [Thomas Carlyle]
Anyone who has a book collection wants for nothing. [Cicero]
A good book has no ending. [R.D. Cumming]
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the centuries past. [Descartes]
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India. [Edward Gibbon]
Wherever books are burned, sooner or later men also are burned. [Heinrich Heine]
A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us. [Kafka]
There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1 – to tell him you have read one of his books; 2 – to tell him you have read all of his books; 3 – to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No.1 admits you to his respect; No.2 admits you to his admiration; No.3 carries you clear into his heart. [Mark Twain]
Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? [Karl Kraus]
I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. [Charles Lamb]
By and large books are mankind’s best invention. [Ursula K. LeGuin]
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read. [Thomas Babbington Macaulay]
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them. [Mark Twain]
It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them. [William Osler]
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books. [George Santayana]
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. [Francis Bacon]
REALITY
Looking at the true state of the world is psychologically unbearable. [Christa Wolf]
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. [Philip K. Dick]
[James Randi has apparently been criticised for being] obsessed with reality!
RECORDING
I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the result of this evening’s experiment. Astonished at the wonderful form you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on record for ever. [Arthur Sullivan to Thomas Edison]
If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human facility already attained. [Edward Bellamy]
At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, like the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disk at his will? Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible? [Claude Debussy]
RESEARCH
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? [Albert Einstein]
Basic research is when I’m doing what I don’t know I’m doing. [Wernher von Braun]
… the outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. [Thorstein Veblen]
Within the university… you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It’s perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent. [Jacques Derrida]
That state of resentful coma that … dons dignify by the name of research. [Harold Laski]
The wonderful thing about research is that the more of it you do, the more of it there is left to do. [David Sarnoff]
When I first came to this country ten years ago, I had the greatest difficulty to find means for my basic research. People asked me, what are you doing, what is it good for? I had to say, it is no good at all. Then they asked me, then exactly what are you going to do? I had to answer, I don’t know, that is why it is research. So the next question was, how do you expect us to waste money on you when you don’t know what you do or why you do it? This question I could not answer. [Szent-Györgyi]
This ideal of endowment for research was particularly shocking to Benjamin Jowett, the great inventor of the tutorial system which it threatened. I remember once, when staying with him at Malvern, inadvertently pronouncing the ill-omened word. ‘Research!’ the Master exclaimed. ‘Research!’ he said ‘A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.’ At this sweeping statement I protested; whereupon I was peremptorily told, if I knew of any such results of value, to name them without delay. My ideas on the subject were by no means profound, and anyhow it is difficult to give definite instances of a general proposition at a moment’s notice. The only thing that came into my head was the recent discovery, of which I had read somewhere, that on striking a patient’s kneecap sharply he would give an involuntary kick, and that by the vigour or lack of vigour of this ‘knee-jerk,’ as it is called. a judgement could be formed of his general state of health.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ Jowett replied. ‘Just give my knee a tap.’
I was extremely reluctant to perform this irreverent act upon his person, but the Master angrily insisted, and the undergraduate could do nothing but obey. The little leg reacted with a vigour which almost alarmed me, and must, I think, have considerably disconcerted that elderly and eminent opponent of research. [L.P. Smith]
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. [Zora Neale Hurston]
The aims of textual criticism, in its historical sense, were straightforward. The corpus of revealed and classical texts had to be properly edited. It was towards this precise end that humanistic-academic scholarship developed and cultivated the disciplines of philology, emendation, recension and lexical-grammatical annotation. In this context, ‘research’ had its exact meaning. It signified a systematic inquiry into the provenance, status, relative worth and interrelations of codices, manuscripts and preceding editions…
Currently, however, ‘research’ has pre-empted a far wider realm. In the academic treatment of the humanities, the fiftieth article on, say, metaphor in Scott Fitzgerald, on the narrative grace of Chaucer, on E.M. Forster’s avoidance of the tragic, will be funded, presented and classified, as research. The same applies to dissertations on writers already entombed in pyramids of paraphrase and opinion. In actual fact, such books, articles and theses are statements of personal intuition, of personal taste, more or less novel, more or less ingenious or productive of debate. Even where they exhibit unusual accuracies of feeling and elegance of proposal, these acts of secondary discourse are not ‘research.’ It is worth noting, furthermore, that such accuracy and elegance belong only to the very few. The entire notion of research in modern letters is vitiated by the evidently false postulate that tens of thousands of young men and women will have anything new and just to say about Shakespeare or Keats or Flaubert. In truth, the bulk of doctoral and post-doctoral ‘research’ into literature, and the publications which it spawns, are nothing more than a grey morass. [George Steiner]
RESEARCH: A procedure for expressing your political prejudices in convincing statistical guise. [Ralph Harris]
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment. [Celia Green]
In any field find the strangest thing and then explore it. [J.A. Wheeler]
To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. [George Porter]
Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. [Vannevar Bush]
That is the only way I ever heard of research going. I asked a question, devised some method of getting an answer, and got—a fresh question.Was this possible, or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him. You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. [H.G. Wells]
Research is like a love affair. The ingredients include: (1) your image of the girl; (2) the real girl as she would appear to you if you… had access to all information about her; and (3) the bits, pieces, or samples of information you have, some of it clear, some of it vague, some of it twisted by memory or biased senses.… Changing a once-loved picture is a very painful process, and we know the degrees to which a lover will go to ignore, twist, and blink away negative data… [Sandra W. Pyke]
Who discovered that CFCs posed a threat to the ozone layer? Was it the principal manufacturer, the DuPont Corporation, exercising corporate responsibility? Was it the Environmental Protection Agency protecting us? Was it the Department of Defence defending us? No, it was two ivory-tower, white-coated university scientists working on something else – Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California, Irvine. Not even an Ivy League university. No one instructed them to look for dangers to the environment. They were pursuing fundamental research. They were scientists following their own interests. Their names should be known to every schoolchild. [Sagan?]
[Surprise] is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic… When you are organized to apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn’t likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, or even bare possibility, rather than certainty. If an experiment turns out precisely as predicted this can be very nice, but it is only a great event if at the same time it is a surprise. You can measure the quality of the work by the intensity of astonishment. [Lewis Thomas]
It has long been known that…
I haven’t bothered to look up the original reference.
While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions…
The experiments didn’t work out, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it.
It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding…
I don’t understand it.
Unfortunately, a quantitative theory to account for these effects has not been formulated…
Neither has anybody else.
It is hoped that this work will stimulate further work in the field…
This paper isn’t very good, but neither is any of the others on this miserable subject.
The agreement with the predicted curve is…
… excellent.
Fair.
… good.
Poor.
… satisfactory.
Doubtful.
… fair.
Imaginary.
As good as could be expected considering the approximations made in the analysis.
Non-existent.
Of great theoretical and practical importance.
Interesting to me.
Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study.
The results on the others didn’t make sense and were ignored.
These results will be reported at a later date.
I might possibly get round to this sometime.
Typical results are shown.
The best results are shown.
Although some detail has been lost in reproduction, it is clear from the original micrograph that…
It is impossible to tell from the micrograph.
It is suggested…;It may be believed…; It may be that…
I think.
The most reliable values are those of Jones.
He was a student of mine.
It is generally believed that…
A couple of other guys think so too.
It might be argued that…
I have such a good answer to this objection that I shall now raise it.
Correct to within an order of magnitude.
Wrong. [C.D. Graham]
REVOLUTION
You cannot make a revolution in white gloves. [Lenin]
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. [Mao Zedong]
In a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment – often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such success. [Joseph Conrad]
Revolution comes like a convalescent fever, between two spells of sickness; it would not exist at all if it were not preceded by fatigue and followed by exhaustion. [Gustave Landauer]
After a Revolution. You see the same Men in the Drawing-room, and within a Week the same Flatterers. [Halifax]
For it is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways… Patiently endured for so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s mind. [Tocqueville]
I was a sincere friend to Reform; I am so still. It was a great deal too violent – but the only justification is, that you cannot reform as you wish, by degrees; you must avail yourselves of the few opportunities that present themselves. [Sydney Smith]
Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. [Pierre Boulez]
We have, alas! too often mistaken newspaper anecdotes of rogues in Paris for the annals of the French nation since the revolution; and in our rage against a phantom of Jacobinism, have shamefully neglected to calculate the blessings from the destruction of Feudalism. The vine of liberty shall not be blasphemed by us, because the Noahs of the revolutionary deluge, who first planted it, were made drunk by its untried fruits. [Samuel Coleridge]
Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones. [Leon Trotsky]
People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make… That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. [Friedrich Engels]
Have you ever considered a career in total revolution? [Situationist (?) poster – speaking to child in wasteland]
Do they really imagine that one fine day or one decisive evening people will look at each other and say, ‘Enough! We’re fed up with work and boredom! Let’s put an end to them!’ and that they will then proceed to the eternal Festival and the creation of situations? [Henri Lefebvre]
Those who make a revolution by halves do nothing but dig their own graves. [Saint-Just]
If there’s no dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming. [Emma Goldman]
