one-liners

Thursday, June 12, 2008
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PERVERSIONS
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From subservience to the mighty Sultan to the worship of the Almighty dollar: some may see progress here, but all I see is a movement from Ottoman barbarism to Yankee moronism.
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The first and most important lesson a patriotic Armenian learns is how to piss on fellow Armenians in the name of patriotism. One reason why I loathe patriots and patriotism, nations and nationalism, empires and imperialism, hooligans and hooliganism, and in general anyone who is willing to massacre innocent civilians simply because he is ordered to.
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“I may agree with you as a human being, but I cannot agree with you as a nationalist,” a reader writes. This perversion of values might as well be a reliable definition of fascism.
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Let our Turcocentric ghazetajis speak of Armenians as victims of Turks. I prefer to speak of Armenians as victims of Armenians.
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In his recently published White House memoirs, Scott McClellan writes, the Bush administration manipulates consent by means of “shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin.” This is news only to the nave, the innocent, the dupes, and the superpatriot.
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Friday, June 13, 2008
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ON JUSTICE
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When asked, “Recompense injury with kindness. What do you think of that?” Confucius is said to have replied: “With what then will you recompense kindness? Injury must be recompensed with justice, kindness with kindness.”
That makes sense, of course, but what if the injury is inflicted within an unjust social order? What could be more absurd than to speak of justice in a totalitarian or corrupt state?
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Confucius on the superior man:
“He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.”
It follows: Never trust a man who suffers from chronic verbal diarrhea, namely, sermonizers, speechifiers, and anyone else who is in the business of recycling their verbal trash.
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Our history, as it has come down to us, is less reality and more fantasy; it is, as a matter of fact, a conspiracy of dunces and dupes.
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Corrupt democracies and authoritarian states have identical goals, namely, to manufacture consent by misleading and moronizing the masses. This may explain why, with very minor exceptions, Turks and Armenians are in complete agreement on their own version of the past.
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It is the easiest thing in the world to fool those who are willing to be fooled.
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Anti-Semites do not consider anti-Semitism a prejudice because they don't hate Jews; they just think Jews are hateful. Something similar could be said of them and us. It's astonishing the word-games people play to appear better than they are in their own eyes.
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Saturday, June 14, 2008
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ONE-LINERS
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In our context, financial success and moral failure might as well be synonymous.
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A routine occurrence among us: the brainwashed trying to convince the deprogrammed.
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Instead of bragging about what we know, we should be mortified by what we don't know.
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I could never write a mystery story because I would reveal the contents of the last page on page one. “Cut the crap” is one of my favorite mottoes.
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Turning the other cheek? That's easy. To stop wanting to murder the bastard. That's different.
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You can't educate brainwashed hoodlums who are out to educate you.
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If your answer raises two more questions, you are on the right path.
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The ambition of every smart intellectual today is to be the secretary of a national benefactor. That's where the money is.
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In a authoritarian environment the brainwashed are always better organized than the deprogrammed.
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