2008-09-30

George Orwell

Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones's time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 3

George Orwell

The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 1

2008-09-22

Noam Chomsky

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief. In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on topics such as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do.
The Chomsky Reader (1987, p. 33)

2008-09-20

William Shakespeare

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that.
The Winter's Tale, Florizel, scene iv

2008-09-11

Mahmoud Darwish

Viewpoint
by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

The difference between narcissus
and sunflower
is a point of view: the first
stares at his image in water
and says, there is no I but I
and the second looks
at the sun and says I am
what I worship.
And at night, difference shrinks
And interpretation widens.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Appears in The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008.