text:
Shadow Warrior

Shadow Warrior (1997) is a first-person shooter computer game.

Lo Wang

 * "Oh, like I scared of little snake!"
 * "Tch! Son of a bitch!"
 * "I am the Shadow Warrior."
 * "You no mess with Lo Wang!"
 * "Who wants some Wang?"
 * "A ninja knows no fear."
 * "Pain is for the weak."
 * "You made another stupid move!"
 * "You look like a stupid!"
 * "Try hunting both of us!"
 * "It is natural to die."
 * "Sayonara, scumbag."
 * "You are tiny grasshopper."
 * "Who put these here!? Ow!"
 * "It is good day to die. Ha-Ha"
 * "Just like Hiroshima."
 * "Just like Nagasaki."
 * "Oh, damn, I'm running into walls now!"
 * "Oh, better zip fly."
 * "Everybody dead. I like that."
 * "Ahh, better than acupuncture."
 * "Ancient chinese secret."
 * "Oh, must be American made."
 * "You drive like a baboon in heat."
 * "You very bad man."
 * "This is not a charade."
 * "Dying time's here."
 * "Eat this, pencil dick!"
 * "You can't evade me forever."
 * "I stick a firecracker in your ass."
 * "Haha, call me Mr. Fix It!"
 * "That's no ordinary wang."
 * "You do that you go blind."
 * "Two wangs are better than one."
 * "Hello, is your refridgerator running? Better catch it!"
 * "Tora, Tora, Tora!"
 * "Uh oh, look like Lo Wang need to cut back on sushi."
 * "No, can't use this, this won't fit on my finger."
 * "Before you attack her, wrap your wacka!"
 * "Whoa, must be American made."
 * "Just like Pearl Harbour."
 * "Revenge is dish best served raw."
 * "Oh you little tiny dick."
 * "I am a man with a tool, make a special acupuncture for you!"
 * "This not tournament, this for real!"
 * "No pain, no gain. Hahaha!"
 * "No way, water cold" (USE on some toilets)
 * "Lo Wang need to cut back on Sushi" (Floating Fortress level/medical bay/USE the scale)
 * "Hmmm... no power!" (Trying to turn on the lights)

After killing an enemy using a sword:

 * "Oh, split personality!"
 * "Oh, look, you coming apart!"
 * "You half the man you used to be!"

After killing an enemy using fists:

 * "You blocking with your head again!"
 * "I hope you were paying attention."
 * "It's all in the reflexes."
 * "How's that for kung-fu fighting you chicken shit?!"
 * "I Kill you!"

After causing a large explosion:

 * "Holy cow!"
 * "Holy pieces of cow!"
 * "Holy shit!"
 * "Holy pieces of shit!"
 * "Like Chinese New Year fireworks!"
 * "Holy cow! Look like Duke Nukem! HAHAHA!"
 * "Takusan balls, sukoshi penis."

After hitting an opponent with a sticky bomb:

 * "Look, you have a new friend!"
 * "Oh ho ho, sticky bomb like you!"
 * "Sticky Bomb meet Mr. Stupid."
 * "Better watch out; it go boom!"

When speaking to a woman who is bathing:

 * "Lo Wang soap you good."
 * "Woops, Lo Wang drop soap, you bend over get it, hahaha."
 * "Those real tits?"
 * "Do you want to wash wang? Or do you want to watch Wang wash wang?"

When speaking to a woman who is using a toilet:

 * "What you eat anyway baby?"
 * "Haha, you go poo-poo, hehehe, uh, I leave room."
 * "Hello, what died up here?"
 * "Hey baby, pull my finger! Hahaha!"

When speaking to a woman mechanic:

 * "Hey, baby, you polish too?"
 * "Hey, chicky, you tighten my nuts?"
 * "Lo Wang's drive shaft need service."
 * "So, you good with hands?"

When speaking to a woman in a car showroom:

 * "You got something with a big backseat, two people horizontal?"
 * "How about a test drive, doll?"
 * "See my stick shift? In fast gear, hahaha!"
 * "Whoa, baby, what's up your tail pipe?"

When speaking to woman (Sailor Moon parody) on a ship:

 * "Hey peaches, how bout you moon me? Hahaha."
 * "Hey, since you already in bed, well..."
 * "Hey baby, you in bed? Is there room for two?"
 * "You good lookin' sailor babe."

When speaking to an older woman:

 * "Lady, somebody beat you with ugly stick!"
 * "Maybe if I close eyes it go away!"
 * "Ooh, Lo Wang wish somewhere else now!"
 * "Lo Wang's gonna womit now..."

When seeing rabbits mate:

 * "Having fun little Rabbit? Ha ha!"
 * "Horny rabbits, hahaha."
 * "Push in the bush there rabbit, haha."
 * "Oh, queer bunny."
 * "Oh you faggot rabbit."

Insults that can be played at any time and heard by other players:

 * "You move like a pregnant yak."
 * "You are so stupid! You cannot find ass with both hands!"
 * "You not very good with hands - try DICK!"
 * "Quit jerking off! Come fight me!"
 * "I am sitting here, getting stiff!"

When selecting or obtaining various weapons:

 * "I like big weapons."
 * "Cowabunga."
 * "BANZAII!!"
 * (Shuriken only) "I love the shuriken!"
 * (Sword only) "I like sword - that's a personal weapon."
 * (Sword only) "There can be only one."
 * (Dual uzis only) "Be proud, Mr. Woo."
 * (Railgun only) "Time to get erased."
 * (Nuclear warhead only) "I like nuclear weapons."

Played once at certain spots in certain levels:

 * "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, whoa, I think my dinghy hanging out."
 * "Lo Wang is coming for you little snake coward!"
 * "Go Speed Racer Goooo!"
 * "She's raided her last tomb" [after finding Lara Croft chained to the wall of a prison cell]
 * (To serpent god) "Hey! Come back here and finish fight!... Ugly, scaly, snake... shitface."
 * "Hmm, something flooding or dinosaur taking piss."
 * "Must be here rat, because I trapped like one."
 * "No cell can hold this wang!"
 * "You are weak as a baby fart, go live in fear."
 * "Knock knock you freak, Lo Wang in the house!"
 * "Hmph, rather kick ass than solve puzzle."
 * "Ohh, smell remind me of old girlfriend."
 * "Burn baby burn, flames are gettin' higher!"
 * "Eeyuuh, stink like dead baboon in here."
 * "Heh, this no movie, Mr. Chan."
 * "Welcome to real life, Mr. Chan."
 * "That's no ordinary rabbit."

Fortune say:

 * "Sorry, you no win this time, try again."
 * "Baseball wrong. Man with 4 balls cannot walk."
 * "No man is island, except Lo Wang."
 * "You should kill all business associates."
 * "You should not scratch yourself there."
 * "Man who stand on toilet, high on pot."
 * "Man who buy drowned cat pay for wet pussy."
 * "Don't you know you the scum of society?!"
 * "Man trapped in pantry has ass in jam."
 * "You never going to score."
 * "You try harder get along. Be a nice man."
 * "26-31-43-82-16-29"
 * "Your chi attracts many chicks."
 * "Man who fart in church sit in own pew."
 * "It is better to have loved and lost than to have loved and got syphilis"
 * "There is much death in future."
 * "(c)1997, 3DRealms fortune cookie company."
 * "Courtesy is contagious. So is Gonorrhea"
 * "Having sex is like playing bridge, If you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand."
 * "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs at you."
 * "No one ever died from a broken heart. But a heart sliced from their chest while they looked on screaming? Not gonna lie. That's killed a couple people."
 * "ERROR 404 - FORTUNE NOT FOUND"
 * "All men eat but fu man chu"
 * "This is my katana, this is my gun. One for killing, the other's for... OK, the other's also for killing."
 * "The good news: You're not paranoid. The bad news: Everyone is actually trying to kill you."

title: Shadow Warrior


text:
George Michael

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (25 June 1963 – 25 December 2016), known professionally as George Michael, was an English singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is considered a cultural icon of the MTV generation.

Quotes

 * I spent the first half of my career being accused of being gay when I hadn't had anything like a gay relationship. So I spent my years growing up being told what my sexuality was really— which was kind of confusing.
 * CNN Interview (April 1998), reported in Kara Fox, "1998: George Michael comes out in CNN interview", CNN (December 26, 2016).

 * I have to be honest here, I'm not really interested in selling records to people who are homophobic. I don't need the approval of people who don't approve of me.
 * Interview with Oprah Winfrey (2004), reported in Luke Henriques Gomes, "George Michael: from tortured star to pop icon", The New Daily (December 26, 2016).

Faith (1987)
Understands me If we have faith in each other Then we can be Strong, baby I will be your father figure Put your tiny hand in mine I will be your preacher teacher Anything you have in mind I will be your father figure I have had enough of crime I will be the one who loves you … Til the end of time.
 * This time I think that my lover
 * Father Figure

And people on the streets I'm looking out for angels Just trying to find some peace Now I think it's time That you let me know So if you love me Say you love me But if you don't just let me go...
 * I've had enough of danger
 * One More Try

Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (1990)
He must have let us all out to play Turned his back, and all God's children Crept out the back door Did you cover your eyes when they told you That he can't come back, 'cause he has no children To come back for
 * I guess somewhere along the way
 * Did you cling to the things they sold you?
 * Praying for Time

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: George Michael


text:
Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki Shikibu (紫 式部 Murasaki Shikibu, c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was a novelist, poet, and servant of the imperial court during the Heian period of Japan. She is the author of the Tale of Genji.

The Diary of Lady Murasaki

 * Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.
 * trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)

"Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful; but when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!" How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as such a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am. Her Majesty has also remarked more than once that she had thought I was not the kind of person with whom she could ever relax, but that I have now become closer to her than any of the others. I am so perverse and standoffish. If only I can avoid putting off those for whom I have a genuine regard.
 * So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look upon me as a dullard.
 * trans. Richard Bowring

 * To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do: whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?
 * trans. Richard Bowring

 * When my brother...was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father, a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: "Just my luck!" he would say. "What a pity she was not born a man!" But then I gradually realized that people were saying "It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good," and since then I have avoided writing the simplest [Chinese] character. My handwriting is appalling.
 * trans. Richard Bowring

 * It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.
 * In Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

 * Sei Shōnagon is a smug and horrible person. She acts so smart and is always writing in true [Chinese] characters, but if you look closely, you can find lots of mistakes. People who try that hard to be different from everyone else always end up falling behind, with trouble waiting in their future; and people who are that affected act all mono no aware and attend all the interesting events even when they're lonely and bored, so that in the end the affectation stops being an act. How exactly are things going to end well for a person like that?
 * (source)

 * Unforgettably horrible is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm.

Tale of Genji

 * Mono no aware.
 * The sadness of things.
 * Passim. Cf. Lacrimae rerum.
 * Variant translations:
 * The pathos of things.
 * A sensitivity to things.
 * The sorrow of human existence.

 * I have finally realized how rarely you will find a flawless woman, one who is simply perfect. No doubt there are many who seem quite promising, write a flowing hand, give you back a perfectly acceptable poem, and all in all do credit enough to the rank they have to uphold, but you know, if you insist on any particular quality, you seldom find one who will do. Each one is all too pleased with her own accomplishments, runs others down, and so on. While a girl is under the eye of her adoring parents and living a sheltered life bright with future promise, it seems men have only to hear of some little talent of hers to be attracted. As long as she is pretty and innocent, and young enough to have nothing else on her mind, she may well put her heart into learning a pastime that she has seen others enjoy, and in fact she may become quite good at it. And when those who know her disguise her weaknesses and advertise whatever passable qualities she may have so as to present them in the best light, how could anyone think ill of her, having no reason to suspect her of being other than she seems? But when you look further to see whether it is all true, I am sure you can only end up disappointed.
 * Spoken by Tō no Chūjō in Ch. 2: The Broom Tree (trans. Royall Tyler)

 * "No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly," His Highness replied, "...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it."
 * Ch. 17: Eawase (trans. Royall Tyler)

The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley

 * Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.
 * Ch. 1: Kiritsubo

 * Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.
 * Ch. 1

 * It is in general the unexplored that attracts us.
 * Ch. 9: Aoi

 * Though the snow-drifts of Yoshino were heaped across his path, doubt not that whither his heart is set, his footsteps shall tread out their way.
 * Ch. 19: A Wreath of Cloud

 * Does it not move you strangely, the love-bird's cry, tonight when, like the drifting snow, memory piles up on memory?
 * Ch. 20: Asagao

 * [The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.
 * Ch. 25: The Glow-Worm

 * Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.
 * Ch. 25

 * I have never thought there was much to be said in favor of dragging on long after all one's friends were dead.
 * Ch. 29: The Royal Visit

 * One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome.
 * Ch. 36: Kashiwagi

 * You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.
 * Ch. 40: The Law

 * Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.
 * Ch. 41: Mirage

Quotes about Murasaki

 * Heian Japan offers us some of the earliest examples of an attempt by women living in a male-dominated society to define the self in textual terms. Indeed, it is largely because of these works that classical Japanese becomes of more than parochial interest: as a result, the Heian period as a whole will always bear for us a strong female aspect. To a great extent it is the women who are the source of our historical knowledge: they have become our historians, and it is they who define the parameters within which we are permitted to approach their world and their men. In retrospect it is a form of sweet revenge.
 * Richard Bowring, Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 12

 * There have been many interpretations over the years of the purpose of this tale. But all of these interpretations have been based not on a consideration of the novel itself but rather on the novel as seen from the point of view of Confucian and Buddhist works, and thus they do not represent the true purpose of the author. To seize upon an occasional similarity in sentiment or a chance correspondence in ideas with Confucian and Buddhist works, and proceed to generalize about the nature of the tale as a whole, is unwarranted. The general appeal of this tale is very different from that of such didactic works. Good and evil as found in this tale do not correspond to good and evil as found in Confucian and Buddhist writings. [...] Generally speaking, those who know the meaning of the sorrow of human existence, i.e., those who are in sympathy and in harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as good; and those who are not aware of the poignancy of human existence, i.e., those who are not in sympathy and not in harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as bad. [...] Since novels have as their object the teaching of the meaning of the nature of human existence, there are in their plots many points contrary to Confucian and Buddhist teachings. This is because among the varied feelings of man's reaction to things—whether good, bad, right, or wrong—there are feelings contrary to reason, however improper they may be. Man's feelings do not always follow the dictates of his mind. They arise in man in spite of himself and are difficult to control. In the instance of Prince Genji, his interest in and rendezvous with Utsusemi, Oborozukiyo, and the Consort Fujitsubo are acts of extraordinary iniquity and immorality according to the Confucian and Buddhist points of view. It would be difficult to call Prince Genji a good man, however numerous his other good qualities. But The Tale of Genji does not dwell on his iniquitous and immoral acts, but rather recites over and over again his awareness of the sorrow of existence, and represents him as a good man who combines in himself all good things in men.
 * Motoori Norinaga, Genji Monogatari: Tama no Ogushi ("The Jeweled Comb of The Tale of Genji"), c. 1796

 * The purpose of the Tale of Genji may be likened to the man who, loving the lotus flower, must collect and store muddy and foul water in order to plant and cultivate the flower. The impure mud of illicit love affairs described in the Tale is there not for the purpose of being admired but for the purpose of nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow of human existence.
 * Motoori Norinaga, in Tsunoda et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume II (Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 29

 * The Tale of Genji quite clearly breaks in two with Genji's death, but there is an earlier break, as Genji goes into his middle and late forties. If the book may thus be thought of as falling into three parts, the first part still has a great deal of the tenth century in it. The hero is an idealized prince, and, though there are setbacks, his early career is essentially a success story. [...] Then, some two-thirds of the way through the sections dominated by Genji, there comes a tidying up and packing away of things, as by someone getting ready to move on, and the matter of the last eight chapters before Genji's disappearance from the scene is rather different. Enough of romancing, Murasaki Shikibu seems to say, and one may imagine that she is leaving her own youth behind, the sad things are the real things. Shadows gather over Genji's life. The action is altogether less grand and more intimate, the characterization more subtle and compelling, than in the first section. Then, suddenly, Genji is dead. [...] Once more, and very boldly this time, Murasaki Shikibu has moved on. After the three transitional chapters come what are generally called the Uji chapters. The pessimism grows, the main action moves from the capital to the village of Uji, both character and action are more attenuated, and Murasaki Shikibu has a try, and many will say succeeds, at a most extraordinary thing, the creation of the first anti-hero in the literature of the world.
 * Edward Seidensticker, Introduction (January 1976) to Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (Penguin Books, 1981), pp. x–xi

title: Murasaki Shikibu


text:
Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was an American writer, poet, public intellectual. He is mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and as an activist on the pacifist Left.

Quotes

 * Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical.
 * as quoted in Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism

Eager to beat her, first I looked on her eyes. I made a Spanish move, an ancient one, and broken was the red rank of pawns in her light eyes. Then I lowered my eyes from that chessboard and Love said, "Oh not her; conquer the king if you can."
 * The chessboard was reflected in her eyes.
 * "A Chess Game" St. 1, Collected Poems, Random House, 1973, ISBN 0394483588.

 * There is a dilemma in any High Standard of Living in a profit economy. I am referring to the embarrassing truth that the best things in life are free. ... things like friendly competitive sports, friendly gambling, love-making and sex, solitary study and reading, contemplation of nature and cosmos, art-working, music, religion.
 * "Leisure and Work" (1962)

 * This I did with all my will and apparently indefatigably (but I will one day drop with weariness)—I invented a different practical world that made no sense and took the heart out of me. Instead of resigning, I reacted, in moments of despair, by thinking up something else, and behaving as if this more pleasing landscape might indeed come to be the case.
 * Making Do (1963)

 * Life gets you coming and going. If you sterilize or police the spontaneity of children, it will return as stupidity, gracelessness, and violent crime.
 * The Open Look (1969)

 * It is not hard to envisage a society in the near future in which self-reliant and autonomous people who know nothing will be attendants of a technological apparatus over which they have no control.
 * "The Present Moment in Education", final revision

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

 * Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. … The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don’t more people speak up and say so?
 * p. x.

 * Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
 * p. xiii.

 * We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.
 * p. xiii.

 * We do not need to be able to say what “human nature” is in order to be able to say that some training is “against human nature.”
 * p. 6.

 * Social scientists … have begun to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.” They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication. … But perhaps there has not been a failure in communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. … We must ask the question, “Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?”
 * pp. 10-11.

 * Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.
 * p. 13.

 * It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
 * p. 14.

 * It is hard to grow up in a society in which one’s important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.
 * p. 36.

 * The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.
 * pp. 36-37.

 * To want a job that exercises a man’s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the “sole prerogative” to determine the products.
 * p. 37.

 * Because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labor” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
 * p. 37.

 * The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.
 * p. 38.

 * A boy of ten or eleven has a few great sexual experiences—he thinks they’re great—but then he has the bad luck to get caught and get in trouble. They try to persuade him by punishment and other explanations that some different behavior is much better, but he knows by the evidence of his senses that nothing could be better. … The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe he has had the sexual experience. That objective factor is inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist. … The sensible course would be to accept it as a valuable part of further growth. But if this were done, they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten apple to his peers, who now would suddenly all become precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to delinquency. The sexual plight of these children is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far. … The question here is not whether the sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no dialog, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society.
 * pp. 38-39.

 * Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
 * p. 40.

 * During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the world. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up. … Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. … In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity.
 * p. 42.

 * As Frederic Thrasher says in The Gang, “Other things being equal, the imaginative boy has an excellent chance to become the leader of the gang. He has the power to make things interesting for them.” … After a disastrous week when there were several juvenile murders, the Governor of New York made the following statement (New York Times, September 2, 1959): “We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folks and to provide an outlet for their energies and give them a sense of belonging.” … The gist of it is that the Governor of New York is to play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teen-age gang leader. He is to think up new “challenges.” … But it is the word “constantly” that is the clue. A challenge can hardly be worth while, meaningful, or therapeutic if another must constantly and obsessively be devised to siphon off a new threat of “energy.” … Solidly meeting real needs does not have this character. My guess is that in playing games the Governor will not have so lively an imagination as the lad he wants to displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will never select him. One of the objective factors that make it hard to grow up is that Governors are likely to be men of mediocre human gifts.
 * pp. 42-43.

 * We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t. You can’t make me.”)
 * pp. 71-72.

 * Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
 * p. 83.

 * The “brightness” of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.
 * p. 85.

 * We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
 * p. 94.

 * Children, if we observe them, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing.
 * pp. 139-140.

 * The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
 * p. 143.

 * The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.
 * p. 144.

 * When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.
 * p. 144.

 * A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can’t buy that because the word doesn’t exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.
 * p. 145.

 * Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.
 * pp. 145-146.

 * One striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame. … Yet in ancient education, e.g. in the Socratic dialogs, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame. The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities for honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. Since he has no future, if we make him ashamed of his past and present, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was an honor.
 * p. 149.

 * Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it’s believed to be phony anyway, and if it’s true, the person is hard to get along with.
 * pp. 150-151.

 * The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men … is a study in immunizing people against their virus. … They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. … The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.
 * p. 152.

 * Few great men could pass personnel.
 * p. 153.

 * We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
 * p. 153.

 * When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. … We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.
 * p. 153.

 * To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man.
 * pp. 153-154.

 * It is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do. The void is soon filled. Behavior like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but I doubt that it would be run if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive.
 * p. 154.

 * Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable question of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by “experiences” (“kicks”) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one’s skin, to where no questions are asked—nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in.
 * p. 156.

 * In such an environment there operates an unfortunate natural selection. Since not only the rewards but also the means and opportunities of public activity belong to the organized system, a bright boy will try to get ahead in it. He will do well in school, keep out of trouble, and apply for the right jobs. It would follow from this that the organized system is sparked by a good proportion of the bright boys, and so it is. On the other hand, in sheer self-protection, smart boys who are sensitive, have strong animal spirits or great souls, cannot play that game. There are two alternative possibilities: (1) Either the advantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit their powers, and they turn into cynical pushers or obsessional specialists or timid hard workers that make up the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural virtues and perhaps alternative training are too strong and they become independents; but as such they are hard put, not so much hard put for money as for means to act; and so they are likely to become bitter, eccentric, etc., and so much the less effective in changing the system they disapprove
 * p. 157.

 * The paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning.
 * (describing the language of the “Beat” generation, p. 175.

 * Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.
 * p. 176.

 * In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, … it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
 * p. 179.

 * An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren’t much in the world, how do you know you are “out of this world”?
 * p. 183.

 * Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present … without long discipleship and secure sustenance.
 * p. 189.

 * In our truly remarkable an unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly clears—and nevertheless none of this come to joy or tragic grief or any other final good—it is not surprising if there are explosions.
 * p. 209.

 * Literary critics like Lionel Trilling … demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble.
 * p. 214.

Quotes about Paul Goodman

 * Odonanism is roughly identifiable with anarchism. I think it is a fairly identifiable form of the anarchist lineage of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and, to a large extent, Paul Goodman. It's pacifist anarchism, an identifiable tradition, not Bakhunism. It's just that nobody else had ever used it for fiction-it seemed such a pity.
 * 1980 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

 * I read Goodman and Kropotkin and Emma and the rest, and finally found a politics I liked. But then I had to integrate these political ideas, which I'd formulated over a good year's reading, into a novel, a utopia. The whole process took quite a while, as you might imagine, and there were hundreds of little details that never found their way into the novel.
 * 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

 * ("I wonder what you think the writer's role is in terms of addressing politics in the world.") I never really think of that though I'm often asked that question. I always think that the writer's role is to get off her or his ass and to get on the street and do something. But that answer does not satisfy people. But to me that's a very important thing. I think of someone like Paul Goodman who really felt that the thing was action. So then he could write all the love poems he wanted for the rest of his life.
 * 1985 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley

 * Sometimes you come to literature that seems related to your own in some ways, but after you've been writing for a while. And then you feel terribly corroborated. Like Paul's [Goodman] stories, the ones I really love the most, I read them much later, but they made me feel very good about certain things I was doing.
 * 1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley

title: Paul Goodman


text:
William J. Brennan, Jr.

William Joseph Brennan, Jr. (April 25, 1906 – July 24, 1997) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 to 1990.

Quotes

 * Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.
 * Writing for the court, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

 * We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
 * Writing for the court, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).

 * Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. "The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools." Shelton v. Tucker, supra at 364 U. S. 487. The classroom is peculiarly the "marketplace of ideas." The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth "out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection." United States v. Associated Press, 52 F. Supp. 362, 372. In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234, 354 U. S. 250, we said: "The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die."
 * Writing for the court, Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967), at 603.

 * "If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or begat a child."
 * Writing for the court, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

 * Our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination, rationalized by an attitude of 'romantic paternalism' which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
 * Writing for the court, Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973).

 * More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.
 * Writing for the court, Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 353 (1976).

 * The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
 * Speech to the Text and Teaching Symposium at Georgetown University (October 12, 1985).

 * "The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans... The ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. What the constitutional fundamentals meant to the wisdom of other times cannot be their measure to the vision of our time. Similarly, what those fundamentals mean for us, our descendants will learn, cannot be their measure to the vision of their time.
 * Speech to the Text and Teaching Symposium at Georgetown University (October 12, 1985).

 * No doubt, there are those who believe that judges-and particularly dissenting judges-write to hear themselves say, as it were, I I I. And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.
 * In Defense of Dissents, 37 Hastings L. J. 427, 428 (1985-1986).

 * The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.
 * Dissenting, McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987).

 * If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
 * Texas vs. Johnson, 491 US 397 (1989)

 * Yet the ultimate problem is more fundamental. I have long believed that the death penalty is in all circumstances a barbaric and inhuman punishment that violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its constitutional obligation to respect human dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by emulating the murderer who took his life. The fatal infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.
 * Writing in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence (1997).

 * The machinery chugs on unabated, belching out its dehumanizing product. It is distressing. But I refuse to despair. I know, one day, the Supreme Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.
 * Writing in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence (1997).

 * If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
 * Writing in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence (1997).

Quotes about William J. Brennan, Jr.

 * Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall were the last of the Court's liberals.
 * Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

title: William J. Brennan, Jr.


text:
Hermione Gingold

Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold (9 December 1897 – 24 May 1987) was a British actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona.

Quotes

 * Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns.
 * Saturday Review, 16 April 1955; quoted in Ned Sherrin, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

 * My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands.
 * The World is Square [her autobiography], Pt. I. Pub. 1945 by Home & Van Thal Ltd.

title: Hermione Gingold


text:
P. D. James

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE FRSA FRSL (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014), commonly known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer and Conservative life peer in the House of Lords.

Quotes

 * I always had a sceptical and slightly morbid caste of mind, so my first response to Humpty Dumpty was "Did he fall or was he pushed?" I was drawn to the macabre, and for some reason I was very interested, from earliest childhood, in death. I seemed to think about it a great deal. It may have been something to do with the war, which overshadowed my childhood. My father talked about it a lot. It was like a great universal pain.
 * Interview with Victoria McKee, quoted in Victoria McKee, 'P.D. James', The Times Magazine (22 May 1993), p. 43

 * One of my earliest loves was the Book of Common Prayer. I was seduced by it, by its beautiful words and the sense of history.
 * Interview with Victoria McKee, quoted in Victoria McKee, 'P.D. James', The Times Magazine (22 May 1993), p. 43

 * My English teacher, Miss Daisy Dalgliesh, really made Shakespeare live for me, although I didn't see it on stage until I was an adult. I named my detective after her. It was years later that I found out her father was called Adam Dalgliesh.
 * Interview with Victoria McKee, quoted in Victoria McKee, 'P.D. James', The Times Magazine (22 May 1993), p. 43

 * Unless the young can use language effectively, both to express their own minds and to understand the minds of others, it is difficult to see how we can have a vigorous democracy in which ideas and policies can be intelligently presented, considered and criticised or achieve that understanding with other countries which nations enjoy through access to each other's language and literature.
 * 'English must be saved', The Times (14 June 1993), p. 14

 * Because English is spoken and written in so many forms for a variety of purposes throughout the world it is surely important that English in its highest form should be taught, spoken and valued in this country. Yet few would deny that standards of written and spoken English are in decline among all sections of the community and that we are in real danger of becoming an illiterate society.
 * 'English must be saved', The Times (14 June 1993), p. 14

 * We also had the inestimable advantage of beginning each school day with an act of worship which included a reading from the King James Bible which, with the Book of Common Prayer, has had more influence on our language, literature, history and culture than any other book, but which today a majority of our children will never encounter.
 * 'English must be saved', The Times (14 June 1993), p. 14

 * We cannot aspire to a "classless society", whatever that may mean, if some children are disadvantaged the moment they open their mouths, or if we arrogantly assume that only the young from certain backgrounds are capable of enjoying Shakespeare. Language and literature are not static. They change, develop, grow from the past and feed on the past. If we simply cease to care, if we debase, abuse, neglect our language and our literature, the time will come when reading will be the pursuit of a privileged élite and we shall no longer produce books worth reading or have a language and literature worth preserving.
 * 'English must be saved', The Times (14 June 1993), p. 14

 * I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
 * Paris Review (1995), as cited in The Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations (2011), ed. Susan Ratcliffe, Oxford University Press, p. 250 : ISBN 0199609128

 * I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
 * Interview with Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph, 26 Sep 2009.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)

 * Cordelia was fumbling in her shoulder bag for her own key. As usual the object most required had fallen to the bottom of the bag.
 * Ch.1 - at p.11 [Page numbers per the Sphere Books Limited 1974 paperback edition (second 1981 reprint).]

 * Invited by Major Markland to sit, Cordelia perched on the edge of the sofa, half expecting the smooth cushion to let out a rude noise as it subsided beneath her. She found it, however, unexpectedly hard.
 * Ch.2 - p.44

 * It was only in fiction that the people one wanted to interview were sitting ready at home or in their office, with time, energy and interest to spare. In real life they were about their own business and one waited on their convenience.
 * Ch.2 - p.62

 * "It isn't what you suspect, it's what you can prove that counts."
 * Ch.2 - p.70

 * "If there's any sort of existence after death we shall all know it soon enough. If there isn't, we shan't exist to complain that we've been cheated."
 * Ch.3 - p.84

 * To enjoy the sole attention of one agreeable man and no attention at all from anyone else was all she ever hoped from a party.
 * Ch.3 - p.97

 * Cordelia read the inscription carved deep on the headstone. "At rest": the commonest epitaph of a generation to whom rest must have seemed the ultimate luxury, the supreme benediction. "It's a nice stone, isn't it?" "Yes, it is. I was admiring the lettering." "Cut deep, that is. It cost a mint of money but it was worth it. That'll last, you see. Half the lettering here won't, it's that shallow. It takes the pleasure out of a cemetery. I like to read the grave stones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely. There's no use in a stone if you can't read the lettering."
 * Ch.4 - p.114

 * "My mother used to say, 'Don't marry for money, but marry where money is! ' There's no harm in looking for money as long as there's kindness as well."
 * Ch.4 - p.117

 * "But what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can't love one another?"
 * Ch.6 - p.162

 * There were moments, usually on a sunny Easter morning, when she wished that she could with sincerity call herself a Christian; but for the rest of the year she knew herself to be what she was - incurably agnostic but prone to unpredictable relapses into faith.
 * Ch.6 - p.177

 * "Are you sorry about Isabelle leaving?" "I am rather. Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense. I could never quite accept that Isabelle was what she is: a generous, indolent, over-affectionate and stupid young woman. I thought that any woman as beautiful as she must have an instinct about life, access to some secret wisdom which is beyond cleverness. Every time she opened that delicious mouth I was expecting her to illumine life. I think I could have spent all my life just looking at her and waiting for the oracle. And all she could talk about was clothes."
 * Ch.6 - p.182

 * She remembered what Bernie had told her: "In this country, if people won't talk, there's nothing you can do to make them, more's the pity. Luckily for the police most people just can't keep their mouths shut. The intelligent ones are the worst. They just have to show how clever they are, and once you've got them discussing the case, even discussing it generally, then you've got them."
 * Ch.6 - p.195

 * "Hunch is a good servant but a poor master."
 * Ch.7 - p.203

A Taste for Death (1986)

 * It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
 * p. 373

 * I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
 * p. 412

The Children of Men (1992)

 * If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
 * Chapter 1.

 * I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.

 * Use some reverence. Remember what he was only a minute ago. You wouldn't have dared laid a hand on him.
 * Dr. Theodore Faron About Xan.

 * We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

 * Darling, you can't promise that...but I like to hear you say it.

 * I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me.

 * When my turn comes I propose to take my lethal capsule comfortably in bed at home and preferably on my own.

 * Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future.

 * Whatever else I am now, I'm never bored.

 * I'm not a tyrant, but I can't afford to be merciful. Whatever it is necessary to do, I will do it.

 * Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope he burns in His own Hell.
 * A driver upon being asked if he believed in God.

 * We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we enjoyed birth. You can't share either experience''.
 * Woolvington.

 * The Man Penal settlement. Do you know whats happening there? The murders, the starvation, the complete breakdown of law and order.
 * We do. The question is, how do you?
 * I don't want to kill you.
 * You're going to have to, Xan. You may have to kill her, too.
 * I don't think God bargains.
 * Oh yes he does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He's supposed to be just. If he wants belief He'd better provide some evidence.
 * That He exists?
 * That he cares.
 * Chapter 27, P. 186.

A Certain Justice (1997)

 * How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being.
 * Ch.8 - at p.99 [Page numbers per the Penguin Books 1998 paperback edition.]

 * They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?
 * Ch.11 - p.125

 * Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?
 * Ch.11 - p.126

 * His face was a mask betraying nothing.
 * Ch.11 - p.135

 * No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows.
 * Ch.13 - p.155

 * The street and the houses had a perfection which was almost intimidating. No weed, thought Kate, would surely dare to push its unsanctified tendrils through these carefully tended small lawns and flower beds.
 * Ch.14 - p.163

 * Mrs Buckley was revealed as a slight, nervous-looking woman with a small precisely formed mouth between bulging cheeks, which gave her the appearance of a hamster.
 * Ch.14 - p.164

 * He looked more like a professional rugger player than a lawyer, though not when he wore his wig. Then the face became an impressive mask of judicial gravitas. But, thought Langton, wigs metamorphose us all; perhaps that's why we're so unwilling to get rid of them.
 * Ch.16 - p.181

 * "...We have a reputation for being difficult. Chambers is a collection of intelligent, highly independent, idiosyncratic, critical and overworked men and women whose profession is argument. It's a dull set which doesn't contain its share of eccentrics and personalities who could be described as difficult. ..."
 * Ch.16 - p.190

 * Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect.
 * Ch.17 - p.198

 * He had learned to be as wary of intuition as he was of superficial judgements, but it was hardly possible to be a long-serving detective officer and not know when a witness was lying. It wasn't always suspicious or even significant. Nearly everyone had something to hide. And it was optimistic to expect the whole truth at a first interview. A wise suspect answered questions and kept his counsel; only the naïve confused a police officer with a social worker.
 * Ch.17 - p.199

 * It had been the good-looking young detective and the woman officer who had interviewed her, and she had sensed that they were quietly sympathetic. But that of course had been deliberate. They had set out to get her confidence and they had succeeded. She was amazed now how much she had confided to them.
 * Ch.19 - p.214, 216

 * But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis.
 * Ch.19 - p.215

 * A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition.
 * Ch.20 - p.229

 * How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos.
 * Ch.20 - p.229

 * What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut.
 * Ch.23 - p.246

 * Over the tea Enid said: "You know who controls this estate, don't you?" "Yes, the children." "The kids, the bloody kids. Complain to the police or the council and you get a brick through your window. Tell 'em off and like as not you get an earful of foul language and burning rags through the letter-box next day. And if they catch the little bastards and take them to youth court, what happens? Bloody nothing. They come home laughing. They're in gangs now by the time they're eight." Of course they are, thought Kate. How else can they survive?
 * Ch.24 - p.261, 262

 * "I was glad to give up teaching, at least in London, glad to be rid of noise and violence and staff-room politics, and the constant fight to keep order."
 * Ch.27 - p.307

 * "Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous."
 * Ch.30 - p.329

 * He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous.
 * Ch.32 - p.342

 * She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire.
 * Ch.39 - p.425

 * "You need to decide what you're interested in."
 * Ch.46 - p.469

 * If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her?
 * Ch.46 - p.472

Time to be Earnest – a Fragment of Biography (1999)

 * I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art.
 * The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart.
 * Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.
 * Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography Faber & Faber, London 1999.

Sleep no more: Six Murderous Tales, published posthumously in 2017

 * Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike.
 * Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2017, p. 133

Quotes about P. D. James

 * the lesbian community is under siege, we always try to present to the heterosexual community the idealized version, but I do not think that's a good way to do it, even though I can understand where it's coming from. ("Valerie Miner talked about the kinds of self-censorship she finds in her work when she starts thinking she should present only positive images of lesbians or working-class people.") Yes. In that poem and also in the poem "Night Voice" I do that. There's this whole controversy now over media images of lesbians and gays and bisexuals. It's brought out in movies like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs where they are presented as killers. It comes up in the novels of P. D. James, where she has these criminals who are lesbians or gay men. And I hate that. But, at the same time, I want the dirty laundry to be out there, whether it's on the Mexican culture or the lesbian culture or the bisexual. And I'm not sure how you do that.
 * Gloria E. Anzaldúa interview in Backtalk: women writers speak out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

title: P. D. James


text:
Marquis de Sade

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814), better known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French writer of philosophy-laden and often violent pornography, as well as some strictly philosophical works. He propounded a philosophy of extreme licentiousness, unrestrained by ethics, religion or law, with the egotistical pursuit of personal pleasure being the highest principle. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life. Much of his writing was done while imprisoned. The term "sadism" is derived from his name.

The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

 * Le duc imita bientôt avec Bande-au-ciel la petite infamie de son ancien ami et il paria, quoique le vit fût énorme, d'avaler trois bouteilles de vin de sens froid pendant qu'on l'enculerait.
 * The Duke soon imitated his old friend's little infamy and wagered that, enormous as Invictus' prick might be, he could calmly down three bottles of wine while lying embuggered upon it.
 * The First Day

 * Nos quatre libertins, à moitié ivres, mais résolus pourtant d'observer leurs lois, se contentèrent de baisers, d'attouchements, mais que leur tête libertine sut assaisonner de tous les raffinements de la débauche et de la lubricité.
 * Our four libertines, half-drunk but nonetheless resolved to abide their laws, contented themselves with kisses, fingerings, but their libertine intelligence knew how to season these mild activities with all the refinements of debauch and lubricity.
 * The First Day

 * Le duc, le vit en l'air, serrait Augustine de bien près; il braillait, il jurait, il déraisonnait, et la pauvre petite, toute tremblante, se reculait toujours, comme la colombe devant l'oiseau de proie qui la guette et qui est près d'en faire sa capture.
 * The Duc, pike aloft, closed in upon Augustine; he brayed, he swore, he waxed unreasonable, and the poor little thing, all atremble, retreated like a dove before the bird of prey ready to pounce upon it.
 * The Second Day

Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1787)

 * ...there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people...

 * Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

 * Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

 * I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts.

Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

 * Voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex, it is to you only that I offer this work; nourish yourselves upon its principles: they favor your passions, and these passions, whereof coldly insipid moralists put you in fear, are naught but the means Nature employs to bring man to the ends she prescribes to him; harken only to these delicious promptings, for no voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness.
 * To Libertines

 * Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.
 * To Libertines

 * You young maidens, too long constrained by a fanciful Virtue's absurd and dangerous bonds and by those of a disgusting religion, imitate the fiery Eugénie; be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents.
 * To Libertines

 * And you, amiable debauchees, you who since youth have known no limits but those of your desires and who have been governed by your caprices alone, study the cynical Dolmancé, proceed like him and go as far as he if you too would travel the length of those flowered ways your lechery prepares for you; in Dolmancé's academy be at last convinced it is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses' pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.
 * To Libertines

 * The pleasures I tried to deny myself of assailed my mind all the more ardently; and I saw that if a person is born, like me, to debauchery, it is useless to apply restraints: fiery desires will soon shattter them. Ultimately, my dear, I'm an amphibious creature: I love everything, I enjoy everything, I want to try all kinds of pleasures.
 * First Dialogue, Madame de Saint-Ange

 * We must pity those who have such singular tastes, but never insult them: their lack is a lack in nature. They are no more the masters of arriving in this world with bizarre tastes that we are the masters of arriving bowlegged or shapely. Besides, is a man saying something disagreeable to you when he reveals his desire to enjoy you? Absolutely not! He's paying you a compliment!
 * First Dialogue, Chevalier
 * '''Modesty is an old-fashioned virtue, which, given your charms, you must certainly do without.
 * First Dialogue, Delmonce
 * A person must have lost his mind to believe in God. The product of either fear or weakness, this abominable phantom, Eugenie, is useless for the system of the earth, It would even be infallibly harmful. You see, its will, which must be just, could never ally itself with the injustice essential to the laws of nature. It would constantly have to wish for goodness, which nature desires only as compensation for the evil that serves its laws. It would have to act continuously, and nature, one of whose laws is that perpetual motion, could only rival and perpetually resist it.
 * First Dialogue, Delmonce
 * What do I see in the God of this infamous cult but a barbaric and inconsistent being, who creates a world one day, then repents its construction the next day? What do I see but a weak being who can never succeed in forming man according to his will? This creature, although deriving from hi, dominates him. And this creature can offend him, thereby deserving eternal tortures. What a weak being that God is!
 * First Dialogue, Delmonce
 * Benevolence is more a vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul.
 * First Dialogue, Delmonce
 * No desire can be termed outlandish, my dear; all desires can be found in nature. When nature created human beings, it delighted in differentiating their sexual leanings as much as their faces; and we should no more be astonished by the diversity of our features than by the diversity that nature has placed in our affections.
 * First Dialogue, Delmonce
 * What good are laws without a religion? We need a religion so distant to that of Rome that we can never return to the religion of Rome. In this century we are furthermore convinced that religion must be based on morality and not morality on religion. Hence we require a reliigion that is faithful to morals, that is virtually their further development, their necessary consequence, and that, in uplifting the soul, can perpetually keep it on the acme of that precious freedom which is now its unique idol.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Oh, you, who are clutching the sickle, give the tree of superstition its final stroke. Do not be content with hacking off the branches. Tear out by its roots a plant with such noxious effects.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—all these great scoundrels, all these big despots of our ideas knew how to bond their concocted divinities with their immense ambitions. Certain of captivating nations with the sanction of their gods, these villains, as we know, took care either to question their deities at an appropriate moment or to have them answer only whatever they believed could serve their purpose.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Survey the histories of all nations. You will never see them exchange their form of government for a monarchy, given their gradation by superstition; you will always see kings supporting religion, and religion supporting kings.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * The total annihilation of divine worship, which we are spreading through Europe. We should not be content with shattering scepters, we must smash idols forever. There has never been more than one step from superstition to royalism.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * All religions concur in exalting the deep-seated wisdom and power of a divinity, but once its conduct is exposed, we find nothing but imprudence, weakness, and folly. God, we are told, created the world for himself, but so far he has failed to have the world honored appropriately. God created us to worship him, and we spend our days mocking him! What a wretched God he is!
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Never will a free man bow to the gods of Christianity; never will its dogmas, never will its rites, never its mysteries, never its morals be suitable for a republican.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * The philosopher must teach these pupils [French students] that it is far less essential to understand nature than to enjoy and respect its laws; that these laws are both wise and simple; that they are written in all human hearts, and that one need merely question a heart in order to appreciate its impulses.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Let us leave off believing that religion can be useful to man. Instead, let us have good laws, and we can then do without religion.
 * The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans

 * You charming sex, you will be free; like men, you will enjoy all the delights that nature has made your obligations; you will not have to be constrained in any pleasure. Must the more divine section of humanity be clapped in irons by the less divine section? Ah, smash those chains—nature wants you to smash them! You should have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other morals than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans

 * The road we have traveled after 1789 has been far more arduous than the road still lying ahead of us, and in regard to what I now propose, we do not need to affect public opinion anywhere as deeply as we have tormented it in every way since the storming of the Bastille. Believe me, a nation that was wise enough, courageous enough to conduct an insolent monarch from the pinnacle of his grandeurs to the feet of the scaffold; a nation that, within a few short years, has managed to vanquish so many prejudices, managed enough wisdom and courage to sacrifice for the good of the cause, for the prosperity of the republic, to immolate a phantom far more illusory than any king could ever be.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * All our ideas are representations of the objects that affect our senses; then what can be represented by the idea of God, which is obviously an idea without an object? Isn't such an idea, or will add, as impossible as effects without causes? Isn't an idea without a prototype anything but a chimera? Some Doctors of the Church, you will continue, assure us that the notion of God is innate, and that a man already has this notion in his mother's womb. But that is wrong, you will add; every principle is a judgement, every judgement is the result of experience, and experience can be gained only through the exercise of the senses.  And it thereby follows that religious principles are obviously based on nothing and are not innate at all. How, you will go on, could anyone persuade rational beings that the hardest thing to grasp was the most essential thing for them? They were terrified; and when you are terrified, you are no longer rational. Above all, they were told to distrust their reasoning; and when the brains are muddled, you believe everything and examine nothing. Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religions.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * '''Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * The first of these blessed charlatans to talk about God or religion will be condemned to being jeered at, scoffed at, covered with mud at all crossroads of the major French towns. If that scoundrel breaks that same law a second time, he will be locked away in an eternal prison. Let the most insulting blasphemies, the most atheistic writings be fully authorized, so that we may completely extirpate those horrifying toys of our childhoods from human hearts and memories. Let us hold a contest to find at last the text most capable of Enlightening Europeans about such a major subject; and let a substantial prize be established by the Nation as recompense for the man who, having said and proved everything about his theme, will leave his compatriots only a sickle to shatter all these phantoms and a straightforward heart to detest them.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
 * After demonstrating that theism is unsuitable for a republican government, I find it crucial to prove that French morals are likewise inappropriate.
 * Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans

 * No act of possession can be exercised on a free being; it is as unjust to own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves. All men are born free, all are equal before the law; we must never lose sight of these principles. Hence, no sex is granted the legitimate right to seize the other sex exclusively, and never can any sex or any class possess the other arbitrarily.
 * The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdadpp. 36

"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"

 * I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?... How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.
 * This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.

Petition in Support of Temples to the Cult of Reason (1793)

 * The reign of philosophy has finally annihilated that of imposture. Man is finally becoming enlightened and, destroying with one hand the frivolous playthings of a divine religion it raises with the other an altar to the divinity dearest to its heart. Reason replaces Mary in our temples, and the incense that burned at the knees of an adulterous woman will only be lighted anew at the feet of the goddess who smashed our chains.

Quotes about Sade

 * (what did you think of de Sade at that age, and later?) I don't like him at all, and he has had no influence in my life. I have not ended up a sadist or a masochist for having read his books.
 * 1993 interview included in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999) Translated from Spanish by Virginia Invernizzi

 * To sympathize with Sade is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires; and every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex maniac, we take a stand against him. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves. He allows that a father may revenge or prevent, even by murder, the rape of his child. What he demands is that, in the struggle between irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely. He approves of the vendetta, but not of the courts. We may kill, but we may not judge.
 * Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sade?" (1955)

 * Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were unchallenged and not challengeable. The tyranny of class was absolute. The poor sold what they could, including themselves, to survive. Sade learned and upheld the ethic of his class.
 * Andrea Dworkin, Pornography

 * The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution-the revolution which lies beyond politics an economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology-are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf.
 * Aldous Huxley letter to George Orwell (October 1949) anthologized in More Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience edited by Shaun Usher (2015)

 * Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature.
 * Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990) NY:Vintage, p. 235

 * Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.
 * Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990) NY:Vintage, p. 235

 * It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.
 * Colin Wilson in The Origins of the Sexual Impulse, p. 90

 * This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."
 * Colin Wilson in The Misfits, p. 86

title: Marquis de Sade