64
" Why, Mr. Anderson?, Why, why?. Why do you do it? Why, why get up?.Why keep fighting?. Do you believe you're fighting...for something?.For more than your survival?. Can you tell me what it is?. Do you even know?; Is it freedom?, Or truth?.Perhaps peace?. Could it be for love?Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now, You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?. Why?, Why do you persist?. Agent Smith ( Matrix Revolutions Movie, 2003 ). "
67
" Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers.But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away. People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy.Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures. One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally.The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there. "
69
" We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.
‘That, of course, is the other main difference. "
― Hugh Laurie , The Gun Seller
70
" You want to fix yourself, change yourself, become someone better. But what about who you already are? You want to craft a mask to wear—something to cover your face. But you already have a face. You are already something.
Your task, as a human being, is not self-augmentation, but self-discovery. Look at yourself with curiosity. Let yourself explore your interests. Delve into your talents. Face your fears. Accept your faults, and give yourself unconditional love.
By learning to explore yourself, you will naturally become the best version of yourself. Of course, you invent your life, but you do not invent your passions. Some things, you must create, and others you must discover.
Learn to be curious about yourself. Then, you will be on the right path. "
― Vironika Tugaleva
72
" What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists.
What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?
There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.
For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical.
Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions. "
― Théophile Gautier , Mademoiselle de Maupin
76
" It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and the character's life along with its expression of life is defined by that surrounding - indeed is created by its own story. Yet, it seems to me now, years after I wrote The Golden Apples, that I did bring forth a character with whom I came to feel oddly in touch. She derived from what I already knew for myself, even felt I had always known. What I have put into her is my passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to risk is a truth that Mrs. Eckhart and I had in common. What animates and possesses me is what drives Mrs. Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are? In the making of her character out of my most inward and most deeply felt self, I would say I have found my voice in my own fiction. "
― Eudora Welty , On Writing
77
" We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal. "
― Mario Vargas Llosa