A curious feature of Franz Kafka’s prose is that, pared down though its lexicon may be, it resists translation. There’s a good reason for that. Dictionaries supply more definitions for basic words than for those of greater complexity because simpler ones are the roots of vast family trees of words; plain language signifies promiscuously.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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The veneration of physical beauty, the Instagramization of culture, is pagan to its roots. The overwhelming cascade of drugs, surgeries, and procedures intended to enhance one’s physical appearance—all precursors to “designer babies”—is a tribute to the externalization of our values.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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Living is despairing, and the dead they rot away.
~ Herta Müller
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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
~ Franz Kafka
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed.
~ Umberto Eco
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Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.
~ Richard Rorty
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Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
~ Charles Dickens
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I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth.
~ Desiderius Erasmus
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The dialectical concept of reality as a social process dissolves the fetishistic forms produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary.
~ György Lukács
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Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled.
~ Leszek Kołakowski
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