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Taj Mahal adalah bangunan yang menjadi bagian dari salah satu tujuh keajaiban dunia. Dibangun oleh Shah Jahan sebagai pusara bagi istrinya Mumtaz Mahal yang meninggal karena melahirkan sungsang ketika peperangan sedang berlangsung. Bagi Shah Jahan Taj Mahal adalah gambaran kecantikan dan keanggunan isterinya yang akan selalu dikenang oleh dirinya dan rakyatnya. Shah Jahan mengutus arsitek berdarah Persia untuk membangun Taj Mahal, Isa namanya. Yang akhirnya jatuh cinta pada Jahanara, puteri Shah Jahan yang bersuamikan Khondamir. Isa sangat mengagumi kecantikan Jahanara yang sangat mirip dengan ibunya, Mumtaz Mahal. Jahanara pun selingkuh dengan Isa yang juga sangat ia cintai, karena sejatinya Jahanara tidak pernah mencintai khondamir. Mereka menikah hanya karena alasan politik. Dibalik bangunan indah dan berdiri megah itu terdapat kisah yang haru, kejam, indah sekaligus membawa pembaca pada zaman kerajaan Hindustan. ↗
The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protected by entrenched constitutional provisions which neither the Legislature nor the Executive may abridge. It would accordingly be improper for us to hold constitutional a system which, as Sachs J has noted, confers on creditors the power to consign the person of an impecunious debtor to prison at will and without the interposition at the crucial time of a judicial officer. ↗
#common-law #constitution-of-south-africa #constitutional-law #credit #debt
Gradually it became known that the new race had a definite purpose, and that purpose was to chart and possess the whole country, regardless of the rights of its earlier inhabitants. Still the old chiefs cautioned their people to be patient, for, said they, the land is vast, both races can live on it, each in their own way. Let us therefore befriend them and trust their friendship. While they reasoned thus, the temptations of graft and self-aggrandizement overtook some of the leaders. ↗
A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this: [image] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything. Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were. ↗
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves. ↗
#past #truth #imagination
Toujours les même excellentes intentions qui pavent si bien l'enfer, l'enfer des camps de concentration. Léon Blum est un homme d'une intelligence raffinée, d'une grande culture, il aime Stendhal, il a sans doute lu et relu la Chartreuse de Parme; il lui manque cependant cette pointe de cynisme indispensable à la clairvoyance. On peut tout trouver dans les rangs de la social-démocratie, sauf des esprits véritablement libres. La doctrine est cependant souple, sujette à autant d'interprétations et modifications qu'on voudra; mais il n'est jamais bon d'avoir derrière soi une doctrine, surtout quand elle enferme le dogme du progrès, la confiance inébranble dans l'histoire et dans les masses. Marx n'est pas un bon auteur pour former le jugement; Machiavel vaut infiniment mieux. ↗
She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war. ↗
Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. ↗
#history #literature #words #life
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850) ↗
