8
" The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present.
The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.
It is much greater. It is a work of art.
It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral.
It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men.
Not animals, not gods.
It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.
It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.
But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.
And doing is life. Doing is karma.
Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man.
You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.
The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.
Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.
The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.
In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.
It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose. "
― Tarun J. Tejpal , The Alchemy of Desire
11
" I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite! "
― Charlie Chaplin
12
" There is no solution for Europe other than deepening the democratic values it invented. It does not need a geographical extension, absurdly drawn out to the ends of the Earth; what it needs is an intensification of its soul, a condensation of its strengths. It is one of the rare places on this planet where something absolutely unprecedented is happening, without its people even knowing it, so much do they take miracles for granted. Beyond imprecation and apology, we have to express our delighted amazement that we live on this continent and not another. Europe, the planet's moral compass, has sobered up after the intoxication of conquest and has acquired a sense of the fragility of human affairs. It has to rediscover its civilizing capabilities, not recover its taste for blood and carnage, chiefly for spiritual advances. But the spirit of penitence must not smother the spirit of resistance. Europe must cherish freedom as its most precious possession and teach it to schoolchildren. It must also celebrate the beauty of discord and divest itself of its sick allergy to confrontation, not be afraid to point out the enemy, and combine firmness with regard to governments and generosity with regard to peoples. In short, it must simply reconnect with the subversive richness of its ideas and the vitality of its founding principles.
Naturally, we will continue to speak the double language of fidelity and rupture, to oscillate between being a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. That is our mental hygiene: we are forced to be both the knife and the wound, the blade that cuts and the hand that heals. The first duty of a democracy is not to ruminate on old evils, it is to relentlessly denounce its present crimes and failures. This requires reciprocity, with everyone applying the same rule. We must have done with the blackmail of culpability, cease to sacrifice ourselves to our persecutors. A policy of friendship cannot be founded on the false principle: we take the opprobrium, you take the forgiveness. Once we have recognized any faults we have, then the prosecution must turn against the accusers and subject them to constant criticism as well. Let us cease to confuse the necessary evaluation of ourselves with moralizing masochism. There comes a time when remorse becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it. Let us inject in others a poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Tehran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Yangon, Harare, and Khartoum, to mention them alone, would do these governments, and especially their people, a lot of good. The fines gift Europe could give the world would be to offer it the spirit of critical examination that it has conceived and that has saved it from so many perils. It is a poisoned gift, but one that is indispensable for the survival of humanity. "
― Pascal Bruckner , The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism
14
" The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane.
It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I was
used to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangovers
and would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadness
while driving her to L.A. International. The sex had
been fine; there had been laughter. I could hardly
remember a more civilized time, neither of us making
any demands, yet there had been warmth, it had not
been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead
meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los
Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach
kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when
you part—a gymnasium of bodies namelessly
masturbating each other. People with no morals often
considered themselves more free, but mostly they
lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became
swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no
gamble or humor in their game—it was corpse
fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were
grounded on human experience down through the
centuries. Some morals tended to keep people
slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State.
Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a
garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You
had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave
alone. "
― Charles Bukowski , Women
16
" I guess he was right; I’m just a scorpion without wings,
God created me this way, no wings, just a poisonous sting,
The one I loved knew my true nature
She knew I could sting her heart, and poisoned her soul,
My lover knew me well, she knew my truth,
She could see my poisonous soul,
My ego bowed to her beauty, always ready to strike
She knew my true nature, she saw the scorpion,
She saw the venom in heart, she loved me still,
I struck her heart multiple times,
I poisoned her soul with my sting,
I guess he was right; I’m just a scorpion without wings
She knew me well; she saw the lethal sting,
She saw her wounded heart, she loved me still
She you loved the scorpion to the end,
She fell in love, and now she’s dead,
The scorpion cries, in agony,
He wishes he wasn’t a venomous beast,
The scorpion suffers; he misses his loved one,
The one he killed, the one he stung,
The one who loved him to the end "
― Quetzal
18
" They taught the women that the home is a shame and in doing so, they successfully decomposed nations. Instead of it being the greatest honour to build a family, it became a laughingstock. And in this becoming, they successfully deconstructed nations. They taught the men that loyalty is merely an option and in doing so, they successfully destroyed nations. Instead of it being the greatest pride to love one woman, it became a joke, a funny side comment. And in this becoming, they successfully poisoned nations. Your home is your atom, your cell, your genome. Your love is your honour, your word, your truth. You wonder why we live in deconstructed nations, you ask one another why you live on torn fibres, cracked ground, and yet you continue to listen to what they tell you. You have put shame where there should be a throne, you have placed a joke where there should be a crown. You have successfully destroyed your nations. "
― C. JoyBell C.
19
" I stopped in front of a florist's window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain. "
― Emil Dorian , Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
