Quote of the Day - March 18, 2012

  For an order to be properly carried out, it is necessary for a man to issue an order that is capable of being carried out. But to know what is and isn't capable of being carried out is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's campaign against Russia, involving millions, but even in the case of the simplest occurrence, since millions of obstacles can always get in the way of either of these. Every order carried out is always one of many that are not. All the impossible orders fail to engage with the course of events and don't get carried out. It is only the possible ones that do engage with the run of subsequent orders, do correspond with the course of events and do get carried out.

Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace Epilogue, Part II, Chapter 6

The Dissociated Evil Impulse

My friend Ken made this:




"It has always been recognized that if you split Being down the middle, if you insist on grabbing this without that, if you cling to the good without the bad, denying the one for the other, what happens is that the dissociated evil impulses, now evil in a double sense, returns to permeate and possess the good and turn it into itself."
-R.D. Laing

Quote of the Day

"Under the pretext of not accepting Evil, we end up making believe that we have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state of affairs—even if this best is not so great. The refrain of "human rights" is nothing other than the ideology of modern liberal capitalism: We won't massacre you, we won't torture you in caves, so keep quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don't want to worship it, or who don't believe in our superiority, there's always the American army and its European minions to make them be quiet."
-Alain Badiou

Innocent Prisoner

“An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered. He will shout and rage. A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet...or he cries. He knows he's there for a reason. The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation.”
Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler






"An unjust law is no law at all." -St. Augustine

• Story Of My Life by Social Distortion

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Sentimentality

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

For example:

Quote of the Day - War & Peace

Volume III, Part II, Chapter 17

"As the enemy closed in on Moscow the attitude of the inhabitants to their situation, far from becoming all serious-minded, actually became more frivolous, as always happens with people who can see a terrible danger bearing down on them. At the first approach of danger two voices always speak out with equal force in a man's heart: one tells him very sensibly to consider the exact extent of the danger and any means of avoiding it; the other says even more sensibly that it's too wearisome and agonizing to contemplate the danger, since it is not in a man's power to anticipate future events and avoid the general run of things, so you might as well turn away from the nastiness until it hits you, and dwell on things that are pleasant. Left to himself a man will usually listen to the first voice; out in society he listens to the second one. This is what was now happening to the good people of Moscow. It was years since there had been so much fun in the city." ¹

¹Tolstoy, Leo. War & Peace. Anthony Briggs Trans. Penguin Classics: London, 1868-9/2005.

Kung Fu Quote of the Day

"You tell a man he is something less than a man, and say it often enough, and even he will believe it. The price he pays is easy to see. The price you pay is hidden, but it is just as deep."
-Kwai Chang Caine

Nothing is the cause of it.

   When a ripe apple falls, What makes it fall ? Is it gravity , pulling it down to earth ? A Withered stalk ? Drying The action of the sun? Increased weight ? A breath of wind ? Or the boy under the tree who wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause of it. It is just the coming together of various Necessary Conditions for any living , organic, elemental event to take place. And the botanist who finds That the apple has fallen Because of the onset of decay in its cellular structure, and all the rest of it , will be no more right or wrong Than The boyunder the tree who says the apple fell Because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall.

Leo Tolstoy . War & Peace. Chapter III, Part I, Chapter I.

Action

"In a world where the normal condition is one of alienation, most personal action must be destructive of one's own experience and of that of the other." -R.D. Laing

Loathsome, stinking underground

There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in a cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite.

For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with it fantasies. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will recall everything, go over everything, heap all sorts of figments on itself, under the pretext that they, too, could have happened, and forgive nothing.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Shout and Rage

An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered. He will shout and rage.



A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet...or he cries. He knows he's there for a reason. The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation.
-HGW XX/7