“The recurring problem of the nineteenth century is that of discovering the core of monstrosity hidden behind little abnormalities, deviances, and irregularities.”
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975
“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for truth; if you don’t care for truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.”
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
“The basic problem, on this point too, is the antagonism that calls for the state machine to make re-education, or brain washing, a legitimate project. That is, in order to subdue the subject the state machine must be able to constitute it. The cause at issue between the repressive state machine and the captured revolutionary, however, is that both know that in their irreconcilability, as in their relationship, they express the maturity of the development wherein the contradiction between productive forces and the circumstances of production becomes antagonistic in the final crisis of capital, and thus the expression of the trend whereby the legitimisation of the bourgeois state has fallen apart.”
–Andreas Baader at his trial.
“It is not the absence of competition that produces development alongside underdevelopment, wealth alongside poverty, employment alongside unemployment. It is competition itself.”
–Anwar Shaikh, “The Economic Mythology of Neoliberalism”
“The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.”
–Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
“What we learned from Rwanda is that the worst inhumanity we can imagine will come again. If there’s a lesson, it is that having seen it before doesn’t immunize us. The opposite may be true: the more we see it the more we accept it as part of our condition.”
–Philip Gourevitch, Never Againism
“What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”
–Roland Barthes, Mythologies
“Papa wasn’t no jockey, but he did teach me how to ride.”
– Anonymous
“Sovereign he who creates the exception.”
–Karl Schmidt, Political Theology
“To be mean is never excusable, but there is some virtue in knowing that one is; the unforgivable vice is to do harm out of stupidity.”
–Charles Baudelaire, “Counterfeit” in Paris Spleen
“Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a goodlooking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It’s funny. It’s tough. It’s heartbreaking.”
–Weegee, Weegee
