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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"I certainly don't know if you could claim that every theft is wrong, but I'll prove to you that every theft is forbidden, by simply locking you up."
"Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena."
"That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke."
"Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious."
"Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."
"I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies."
"Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs."
"Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!"
"Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions."
"Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's."
"Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents."
"Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty."
"I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies."
"My dream is to have a beautiful old house in Monaco."
"Walt Disney was my great hero."
"A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation."
"He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street."
"Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students."
"A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear-instead of being allowed to pursue something higher -stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!"
"If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying."
"We're constantly buying airplane tickets; we travel on the Concorde."
"I do pottery. I love it. It's very relaxing; it takes me to another planet."
"I don't make a habit of watching tennis matches, but I try to watch all the major finals. I try to make time for that. So unless I have something going with the kids where I can't, I try to watch, and I enjoy that."
"By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market."
"Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease."
"Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth."
"I've found a place that would amaze you. People used to live there, but now it's all overgrown and no one goes there. Absolutely no one - only me... Just a little house and a garden. And two dogs."
"He is still my father. He is still a person I know I could trust and he would never do anything against me. Once you're at the top, there are not many people like that. People always want something from you."
"Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it."
"When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced."
"I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis."
"Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that conies of the certainty that there is no certainty.But humor, to recall Octavio Paz, is "the great invention of the modern spirit." It has not been with us forever, and it won't be with us forever either.With a heavy heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh."
"I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up."
"I was always at peace because of the way my mom treated me."
"I have just come from the castle, where I have seen the president of the republic, and I can tell you that he has accepted all of my proposals without making any changes."
"Because I just loved to spend two years of my life in the company of Andy Kaufman and other characters."
"Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with - no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do."
"For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life."
"I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won't believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years."
"I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap."
"For the first time in his life, sex is located away from all danger, away from conflict and drama, away from persecution, away from any accusation, away from worries; he has nothing to take care of, love is taking care of him, love as he's always wanted it and never had it: love-repose; love-oblivion; love-desertion; love-carefreeness; love-meaningless."
"Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality."
"First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy."
"Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything."
"Ever since I was a very little girl, I've dreamed of acting."
"But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . ."
"I was between 2 and 3 in the world for two, three years. That's not exactly where I wanted to be."
"The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped."
"If you go to school and practice for five days a week, it still gives you two days you can go and see your friends, you can go to the movies, you do whatever you like to do."
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