Quotes

"All that glitters is not gold"
- William Shakespeare

“I can explain myself: If you want to be safe, walk in the middle of the street. I’m not joking. You’ve been told to look both ways before crossing the street, and the sidewalk is your friend, right? Wrong. I’ve spent years walking sidewalks at night. I’ve looked around me when it was dark, when there were men following me, creeping out of alleyways, attempting to goad me into speaking to them and shouting obscenities at me when I wouldn’t, and I suddenly realised that the only place left to go was the middle of street. But why would I risk it? Because the odds are in my favour. In the States, someone is killed in a car accident on average every 12.5 minutes, while someone is r***d on average every 2.5 minutes. Even when factoring in that, one, I am generously including ALL car-related accidents and not just those involving accidents, and two, that the vast majorities of rapes still go unreported […] And, thus, this is now the way I live my life: out in the open, in the middle of everything, because the middle of the street is actually the safest place to walk.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

"Un fauteuil, une chaise
Un bureau, une table
Un livre, une r***e
Un journal, une feuille
Un bol, une tasse
Un lit, une couchette
Un bouquet, une fleur
Un tout, une partie

Un homme, une femme
Un «grand homme», une «petite femme»
Le Panthéon, la prostitution"

“Biologically a woman has fewer functional sweat glands than a man and she also has a slightly higher sweating threshold except when pregnant. So women as a rule do perspire less than men, but this minor difference has not been deemed large enough to distinguish the sexes. A lady is not supposed to sweat at all.”
Susan Brownmiller. Femininity

“All those glances that I eat … Ha, you’re only two? I thought you were much more numerous. So that’s hell. … I never thought You remember: the sulfur, the stake, the grill .. Oh What a joke. No need to grill: hell is other people.”
Jean-Paul Sartre

""We who?"

"The f-word! She used the f-word!"

"The road to racial/ class/ gender subordination is paved with theory..."

"Everybody knows that visual is synonymous with superficial. Get a (socially responsible intellectual) life!""

"La culture de masse représente et propose presque toujours des situations humaines qui n'entretiennent aucune relation avec celles des consommateurs, mais n'en continuent pas moins à être pour eux des situations modèles."
Umberto Eco

"The laws of physics and chemistry do not vary according to health or disease. But to fail to admit from a biological point of view, life differentiates between its states means condemning oneself to be even unable to distinguish food from excrement. Certainly a living being's excrement can be food for another living being but not for him. What distinguishes food from excrement is not a physicochemical reality but a biological value. Likewise, what distinguishes the physiological from the pathological is not a physicochemical objective reality but a biological value."

The Normal and the Pathological
by Georges Canguilhem.

"L'homme qui ne possède pas la musique en lui-même,
Celui qui n' émeut pas l'harmonie suave des sons
Est mûr pour la trahison, le vol, la perfidie.
Son intelligence est morne comme la nuit,
Ses aspirations sombre comme l'Erèbe.
Défie-toi d'un tel homme! Écoute la musique."
Shakespeare

"Over the years I have come to realise more and more that
work, any work, even literary creative work, is not the result
of any individual genius but the result of a collective effort.
There are so many inputs in the actual formation of an
image, an idea, a line of argument and even sometimes the
formal arrangement. The very words we use are a product of
a collective history."
Ngugi. 1986

"As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself, is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what 'one' is, one's very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent on that very power is quite another."
Judith Butler. The Psychic life of Power.