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41 " Schopenhauer extended the same idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first. "
― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
42 " Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything. —EGON FRIEDELL, "
43 " In 1942 he was saying—saying without crying, and God alone knows how—that the Jews would have to be withdrawn from Europe after the war and go to their new home. "
44 " It might be said that the United States is the first known case of a civilization developing through disintegration. "
45 " Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out. "
46 " (When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were on file in Littrico’s office.) "
47 " We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you. —NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, HOPE ABANDONED, P. 67 "
48 " Eban said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. "
49 " thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts: "
50 " he was a slave labourer under the Nazis, "
51 " As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that. "
52 " and he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue). "
53 " In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy. —VIRGINIO ROGNONI, "
54 " To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows. —GOLO MANN, GESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN, P. 170 "
55 " (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.) "
56 " a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: “retrospective clairvoyance. "
57 " (A film has to star Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris before it begins to pose a bigger threat to the language than yellow journalism.) "
58 " Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation. "
59 " When he was asked about the technical secret of his jump, he said: "
60 " I merely leap and pause.” (Either you got the pause or you don’t got the pause.) "