#agu

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice. ↗

— Albert Camus

#night #plague #men

One day I saw the big jaguar,Calypso, jump up from the sand and run quickly, snarling, into the jungle. I looked around and the monkeys were jumping and screeching in the trees. Gazing across the water I saw something moving out there, getting closer. It was a canoe with three men paddling towards my shore. I started to smile and then I worried that they might want to kill me. I ran to my house and brought out my bow and arrows. I stood there on the beach, with my feet shoulder-width apart, and prepared for their arrival. ↗

— Doug Hiser

#jaguar #jungle #tropical-calypso #men

I rise today to discuss the National Intelligence Reform bill. I commend my colleagues in both Houses for their hard work in coming to an agreement. As with any conference, each voice is heard, but none can dominate and compromise must be achieved. ↗

— Ted Stevens

#agreement #any #bill #both #colleagues

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#knowledge #orgone #pride #projection #self-knowledge

Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins. ↗

— Gideon Haigh

#india #indian-premier-league #nationalism #india

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ↗

— Stuart Chase

#avoid #concrete #cultivate #delightfully #first

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#jean-paul-sartre #language #the-plague #existentialism

Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering. ↗

— Albert Camus

#the-plague #doctor-who

She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place. It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying; for death looked lovely in her face. ↗

— Francesco Petrarca

#petrarch #plague #death

As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before. ↗

— Lester Bangs

#before #coming #conscience #far #had