one-liners

July 22, 2010
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MEDITATIONS
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In a text on political philosophy I read today of “the inalienable right to resist tyranny and all

illegitimate authority.”
No matter how hard I try I cannot think of a single Armenian authority figure that may be said to have

been democratically elected, and therefore legitimate.
Raffi tells us “treason and betrayal are in our blood.” After long centuries of conditioning, so, it

seems, are tyranny and subservience to tyrants.
Who even dares to speak today of tyranny, subservience, and democracy? We prefer to speak

instead of Turks and massacres, that is to say of past aberrations about which there is little or

nothing we can do, and ignore the present violations of human rights which are within our power to

arrest.
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Dostoevsky: “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others.”
This may suggest there is a pathological liar in all of us.
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“I paint with my prick,” Renoir is quoted as having said.
Some of my readers think with theirs.
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Always be civil to a writer, especially if he happens to be an Armenian. You never know when he may

choose to get even. I for one never read an Armenian I have insulted. An insulted Armenian is like a

sword of Damocles and I already have a forest of yataghans hanging over me.
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When confronted with a difficult problem, ostriches bury their heads in the sand, or so we are told.

Men are smarter: they don’t bury their heads, they bury the problem…even if it means burying

themselves in the process.
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July 23, 2010
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ONE-LINERS
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Truth is an invention of liars.
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Truth is a work in progress, not a finished product.
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The consensus of a million people guarantees nothing. A billion smart men may be taken in as easily

as a single dumb dupe.
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Truth may be one but those who speak in its name are many.
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Lying comes as naturally to men of power as swimming to fish, flying to birds, and slithering to

serpents.
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I am not here to solve problems but to show their hiding places.
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Educating children and brainwashing them might as well be synonymous operations.
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To explain the incomprehensible is to lie.
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The aim of a religion or an ideology is to assert a monopoly on truth.
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Monopoly favors the producer, not the consumer.
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The most dangerous liars are those who speak in the name of truth.
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Faith allows us to believe in a lie with a clear conscience.
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There are as many versions of the past as there are historians.
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Subservience to God also means subservience to those who speak in His name.
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Subservience is hell.
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July 24, 2010
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THREE SCANDALS
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Dead men don't testify.
Permanently silenced voices cannot sing.
No witnesses, no murder.
All career criminals know this.
Turks know it too.
After eliminating a million potential witnesses
and deporting and scattering another million
to the four corners of the world,
they now say, for every Armenian survivor
there are two or more Turkish survivors
willing and eager to testify that
the Genocide is a fiction of our collective imagination
and that it was the Armenians who tried to exterminate Turks.
But that's not the scandal.
The real scandal is that they are believed
by some members of the jury,
and they need only one
for the judge to issue a verdict of not guilty
or to declare a mistrial.
You think Armenians are smart and Turks dumb?
Think again.
We may have truth on our side
but they have the law on theirs.
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Who cares about Armenians?
Not even Armenians.
As for our Turcocentric ghazetajis:
they are no better than hirelings
who are paid to vociferate endlessly
about genocide, genocide, genocide
in order to cover up
the incompetence, corruption, and violations of human rights
of their own bosses and paymasters.
The brainwashed may not see this clearly
but those who have retained the ability to think for themselves do.
It is this second scandal
that is at the root of our self-inflicted “white” massacre.
Armenians are smart?
Don't make me laugh!
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When Jerry Falwell died,
Christopher Hitchens called him
a “vulgar fraud and crook.”
We too have our share of Falwells
but not a single Hitchens, alas!
What we have instead are gutless brown-nosers
by the dozen and by the hundred.
And that, my friends, is our third scandal!
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