Quotes Archive

It’s such hell here especially at night. I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays … The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness they are horrid, I don’t know how anyone could be so foul. They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can, then beetle back again as fast as they can, waking up everyone else in the dormitory at the same time. I still wish I could come home. It’s such a hole this place!

—Prince Charles, From Gordonstoun, circa 1964

(Via the Guardian.)

—Mark Elliot Cullen

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state…. The necessaries of life occasion the great expence of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

—Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, chapter 2, Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society

(Via EoTAW.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist.

—Alain Badiou

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again … till there is victory; that is the logic of the people.

—Mao Zedong

(Via No Useless Leniency.)

—Bryan Klausmeyer

In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages… The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition — that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory.

—Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 225-226

—Bryan Klausmeyer

It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine… Putting out fire by micturating… was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use… Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.

—Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, pp. 42-43

—Bryan Klausmeyer