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"The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."
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Exlpore more Oppression quotes
"Israel is the canary in the mine. What happens to Israel will eventually happen to America itself."
"In a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved."
"Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition."
"So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means."
"The oppressor is never as free as they think they are."
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
"When we oppose oppression, we lift our hands from the collective reins that empower such oppression."
"Slaves in the past were captured by force, today's slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate."
"When you don't make it too far from the plantation, you might as well befriend your captors."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?"
"Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul, the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."
"All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests."
"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."
"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."
"The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.''Do I look like a liar?''You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women."
"All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?"
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