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"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."
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"Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live."
"We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons."
"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."
"I know not which lives more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives."
"A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity-or none at all-with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors."
"Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them."
"No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure."
"Women most often experience shame as a web of layered, conflicting, and competing social-community expectations. The expectations dictate who we should be, what we should be, how we should be."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions — love, apathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle — a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it."
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
"The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters."
"It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France."
"Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it."
"The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories."
"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."
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