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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #ali
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. ↗
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for. ↗
#capitalism #labor #work #life
If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible. We return once more to the nightmare cultures of Hitler, Stalin, King Philip II, Montezuma, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Herod, the Pharaohs; Christ sacrificed himself in vain. ↗
#life
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. ↗
#life
I’m an immortal. But I don’t want to be one anymore. Or rather, I don’t want to be an immortal stuck in a mortal world anymore. There is something greater out there for me, but in order to get it I need someone to put an end to my life in this world. ↗
Like the prophet Jonas, whom God ordered to go to Nineveh, I found myself with an almost uncontrollable desire to go in the opposite direction. God pointed one way and all my "ideals" pointed in the other. It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go...But I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign, which baptism and monastic profession and priestly ordination have burned into the roots of my being, because like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox. ↗
#life
Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth! ↗
Que la vida es inmortal mientras se vive, mientras se está con vida. Que la inmortalidad no es una cuestión de más o menos tiempo, que no es una cuestión de inmortalidad, que es una cuestión de otra cosa que permanece ignorada. Que es tan falso decir que carece de principio y de fin como decir que empieza y termina en la vida del alma desde el momento en que participa del alma y de la prosecución del viento. Mirad las arenas muertas del desierto, el cuerpo muerto de los niños: la inmortalidad no pasa por ahí, se detiene y los esquiva. ↗
