comments

Sunday, December 28, 2008
****************************************
POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
**************************************************
Knowledge is power. Those who know mislead, exploit, and oppress the ignorant as surely as the mighty victimize the weak and defenseless.
*
All my life I wanted to find honest work, and when I finally found one, no one had any use for me. If I persevere, it's because, in Moliere's words: “I prefer a comfortable vice to a tiring virtue.”
*
The danger of belief systems is not their absurdities but the fact that they find strength in numbers, so that the average man with average intelligence feels justified in asking; “Who am I to contradict millions?”
*
If you share the same belief system with a fool, brother, look into it.
*
The language of power: Why try to reason, educate, and convince when you can brainwash, intimidate, and silence those who resist?
*
We like to be massaged – body, ego, soul – and we are willing to pay for it handsomely to speechifiers, sermonizers, and generally speaking, dealers in verbal crapola. As for writers who make us feel uncomfortable, we love to see them starved.
*
As for our so-called cunning: it consists mainly in devising strategies to avoid facing reality.
#
Monday, December 29, 2008
****************************************
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
**************************************************
In politics, and life in general, the meaning that resides between the lines often contradicts the meaning in the lines.
*
Only an unspeakably self-satisfied simpleton with the IQ of a jackass would violate someone's free speech on the grounds that free speech is not a fundamental human right but a privilege bestowed only on those who are infallible, among them himself.
*
My message: We may not be as good as we think we are.
The message of our leadership: We may be better than we think we are.
Needless to add, the naïve souls among us cannot see the connection between this shamelessly flattering self-assessment and the unspoken punch line that inevitably and invariably will follow, “mi kich pogh...”
*
My morning paper informs me today that the prime minister of Turkey called Israeli air strikes in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” He could have said, in war bad things happen to good people. But he didn't. He said “crimes against humanity” -- and so far only 300 dead. I suggest this may well be a new chapter in Turkish foreign policy.
*
The ambition of every Armenian dunghill is to be Mt. Ararat.
*
Thomas Mann: "The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him."
#
Tuesday, December 230, 2008
****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
**************************************************
“My grandmother once said to me...”
If your grandmother said that, who am I to contradict grandmotherhood, shish-kebab and pilaf?
*
If you are honest, you expose the dishonest. If you do something well, you drive the incompetent to bankruptcy.
*
My great failure in the eyes of my Armenian readers is that I write not as an Armenian but as a human being, as if being Armenian and being human were mutually exclusive concepts.
*
We owe all progress to losers. Winners are only the beneficiaries of the struggle initiated and carried out by losers. Winners only deliver the coup de grace.
*
If a fool refuses to learn from the wise, he will have to learn from life, and reality can be a harsh teacher.
*
Whatever wisdom I have I owe it to my folly.
#