Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms:
#45: The more horses you put to, the faster your progress - not of course in the removal of the cornerstone from the foundations, which is impossible, but in the tearing of the harness, and your resultant riding cheerfully off into space.
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Arthur Miller, ‘Why I Wrote The Crucible’:
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense.
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Robert Musil, ‘Questions for Volume Two’ of The Man Without Qualities:
The outstanding personalities of history are criminals: Ulrich’s plans to become a Napoleon. But for the most part, criminal here means: anti-philistine, someone unconstrained. But they really were criminals: murderers, oath breakers, liars, tricksters…
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Joseph Roth: ‘Our Homeland, Our Epoch’
Clearly this is a malignant epoch: where all authority fails…
The pathetic absurdity of the new barbarians corresponds sometimes to the humourless seriousness of a low ranking authority, and sometimes to that insane permissiveness, which believes itself part of the ancestral line. You sometimes have the impression, in the civilised part of the world – which is not spatial, but temporal – that the old people simulate an act of juvenile alienation in order to prove they are still young.
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Neil Postman, ‘Future Shlock’:
Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it. In this century, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several nemeses: ignorance, superstition, moral fervor, cruelty, cowardice, neglect. In the late 1920s, for example, Germany was, by any measure, the most literate, cultured nation in the world. Its legendary seats of learning attracted scholars from every corner. Its philosophers, social critics, and scientists were of the first rank; its humane traditions an inspiration to less favored nations. But by the mid-1930s—that is, in less than ten years—this cathedral of human reason had been transformed into a cesspool of barbaric irrationality.
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Hannah Arendt, ‘Franz Kafka: A Revaluation’:
In a dissolving society which blindly follows the natural course of ruin, catastrophe can be foreseen. Only salvation, not ruin, comes unexpectedly, for salvation and not ruin depends on the liberty and the will of men.
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Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms:
#73: He scavenges the leftovers from his own table; that makes him better fed than the others for a little while, but he also forgets how to eat at table; and so the supply of leftovers dries up.
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