"What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be."
“Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."
“Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?”
"The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt."
“What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly.”
"Every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves...”
"My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not intrude into his space - in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity."
"More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and trends which were originally meant to be subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption."
"While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear."
"Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice?"
“Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.”
“We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.”
"If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”
“It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more successful than ourselves.”
"The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on."
“It's not the same thing: coffee without cream or coffee without milk. What you don't get is part of the identity of what you get.”
“Like love, ideology is blind, even if people caught up in it are not.”
“True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.”
“A friend is someone I can betray with love.”
“If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? "
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