[b]Tom Stoppard
I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing.[/b]
My guess: Working 9 to 5 as a wage slave.
It’s all trivial-your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after but not the life. Believe in god, the solid, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of view. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
Just what the world needs, he thought, another optimist.
I got dizzy, he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?
Nothing, said Moon. I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over.
Let that be my epitaph.
Let’s file this one under, “another dumb bastard bites the dust”.
War is capitalism with the gloves off.
For some in other words. Though, in particular, the mutts they recruit to fight them.
A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.
Trump’s advice to Putin more or less than Putin’s advice to Trump?
You cannot conceive of the quantity of explosives the armies throw at each other for each man killed! The shells make a continuous noise, sometimes like an enormous machine breaking apart. At other times, they come whistling towards you in a thoughtful sort of way and then go crump and the screw cap flies off, hurtling through the air, screaming. There’s a kind of shell which comes with a crescendo like an express train, only faster. Another kind which makes a noise like tearing calico, louder and louder. The largest kind are the ones which burst in the sky and make a double crack, like a wet canvas being shaken out by a giant. Such immense explosions to kill such small, weak animals.
More to the point who makes how much manufacturing them?