notebooks

Thursday, August 5, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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One reason I am overly critical of Armenians is that I see too many of my own failings in them.
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It is not that like all nations or human institutions tribal people are sometimes wrong; rather, they can do nothing right. Everything they do contributes to their disintegration.
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A pundit is useless to an audience of superpundits.
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Capitalism is morally superior to Communism if only because greed for money is less lethal than greed for power.
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More often than not bias is expressed in the selection of facts rather than in their misinterpretation.
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Jean Rostand: “There are some persons we could not cut down to size without diminishing ourselves as well.”
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Thomas Hardy: “More life may tickle out of men through fear than through a gaping wound.”
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Anonymous: “Skinheads have more hair than brains.”
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Anonymous: “A friend in need is history.”
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Friday, August 6, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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The difference between verbiage and garbage is that garbage may be recycled and verbiage cannot because it may contain dangerous contaminants.
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Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923): “Non-rational beliefs are more important in spurring men to action than logical demonstration.”
It is also true that non-rational beliefs generate masters of persuasion who speak in the name of reason and common sense. Aquinas learned more from Aristotle and less from the prophets.
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According to Pavese, who killed himself because an American starlet did not return his love: “One does not kill oneself for love or a woman, but because love – any love – reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.”
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Pascal: “The 'I' is hateful.”
Fichte: “For he who still has a self – in him assuredly there is nothing good.”
It follows, if the “I” or the “self” or the individual is nothing, the state must be everything. Hence the universal appeal of patriotism, nationalism, fascism, and ultimately war and massacre.
I am reminded of Erdogan's dictum: “Muslims don't commit genocide.”
That's because Muslims act in the name of an all “merciful” and “compassionate” Allah. Or rather, their actions are not theirs but Allah's. Now then, go ahead, accuse the Almighty of criminal conduct.
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It is the questions that cannot be answered that are asked again and again. And it is the incomprehensible and inexplicable that generates the greatest number of explanations.
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Where there is censorship, seek to be among the silenced.
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Andre Agassi in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink.”
If life does that to his kind, imagine if you can what it does to the rest of us.
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Saturday, August 7, 2010
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A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE
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Our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire had little knowledge of the Great Powers, little knowledge of the Ottoman temperament, little knowledge of the consequences of their actions, little knowledge of politics, history, and diplomacy, and no knowledge at all of the proposition that a leader is first and foremost a servant of the people and a revolution without popular support is doomed to fail. And they appear to have learned not little but nothing.
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The Ottomanized and Sovietized Armenian today is as merciless as his prototypes. With one difference: he doesn't have a license to kill. But in every other respect he might as well be an agent of the Sultan or the Kremlin.
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When a man selects his evidence, seek for the truth in the unselected fraction.
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The true intention of Turkish denialists is not to convince the jury but to instill the shadow of a doubt in a single juror, because that's all they need for a mistrial.
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More often than not our disagreements are not between two conflicting ideas but between an idea and nothing, and I consider recycled propaganda less than nothing.
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Imagine a sardine in a pool of sharks. Imagine an honest Armenian.
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Rosa Luxemburg: “Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.”
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Amu Djoleto (African poet):
“What you expect me to sing, I will not,
What you do not expect me to croak, I will.”
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