People from France

"I was suddenly arrested by what seemed to be an awful voice proclaiming the words, "Eternity! Eternity! Eternity!" It reached my very soul — my whole man shook — it brought me like Saul to the ground. The great depravity and sinfulness of my heart were set before me, and the gulf of everlasting destruction to which I was verging. I was made to bitterly cry out, "If there is no God — doubtless there is a hell." I found myself in the midst of it."

"I spent a night of watchfulness unto prayer, like Jacob, wrestling the whole night for the Lord's blessing, and towards morning the light of His countenance did very graciously arise upon me. My trust and confidence are renewed in Him, blessed and praised be His adorable name!"

"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again."

"If I can anyway contribute to the diversion or improvement of the country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain."

"When you cook it should be an act of love. To put a frozen bag in the microwave for your child is an act of hate."

"It's not the microwave that's the problem, it's what people put into them. I know people lead busy lives but they should try to sit their children down at the table once a week and cook them simple food."

"The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the moment he committed the crime."

"I study chess eight hours a day, on principle."

"Chess first of all teaches you to be objective."

"Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents."

"During a chess competition a chess master should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk."

"It was impossible to win against Capablanca; against Alekhine it was impossible to play."

"Capablanca was the greatest talent, but Alekhine was the greatest in his achievements."

"In playing through an Alekhine game one suddenly meets a move which simply takes one's breath away."

"Alekhine's attacks came suddenly, like destructive thunderstorms that erupted from a clear sky."

"I can comprehend Alekhine's combinations well enough; but where he gets his attacking chances from and how he infuses such life into the very opening - that is beyond me."

"Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card."

"Fortune favors the bold, especially when they are Alekhine."

"Outrageous luxury is what our clients want!"

"I learned my trade by going out every evening as a young man," he told art historian Rosamond Bernier. "I went to every pretty house in France and Italy and other places too, and I remembered them all, even down to what was on each little table."

"The flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea at Acre is not similar to the flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea in Spain."

"We learn from here the humility of the Holy One, Blessed is He. Since man is in the likeness of the angels, and they would be jealous of him, for this reason, He consulted them."

"They were not aware of the way of modesty, to distinguish between good and bad. Even though there had been put in man knowledge to be able to call the animals names, there had not been put in him the drive towards evil."

"Even a blind man realises when he is naked. So why does it say "And they realised that they were naked"? They had one commandment and were now naked of it."

"God knew where he was, but he asked so as to start a conversation with Adam and avoid startling him too much to reply."

"I come only to explain its simple meaning."

"Eretz Yisrael is higher than all the countries. (Genesis 45,9)"

"So is the Land of Israel: It cannot sustain sinners (Leviticus 18,28)"

"I will make the land [so] desolate- This is [actually] a kindly measure for Israel, for their enemies will not find any satisfaction in their land, for it will be desolate of its inhabitants. (Leviticus 26,32)"

"" [We learn] from this that we tell only part of a man's qualities in his presence, and all of them when he is not present." Genesis 7,1"

"" Yisrael camped there. As one person with one heart (mind)." Exodus 19,2"

"" From here [we derive] that one should not maintain a dispute." Numbers 16,12"

"" When they gather together as a single unit, and there is harmony among them--- then He is their king, but not when there is dissention among them." Deuteronomy 33,5"

"" A falsehood in which some truth is not stated at the beginning, cannot be maintained in the end." Numbers 13,27"

"" With your own blemish do not taunt your fellow." Deuteronomy 10,19"

"Ay, 'tis thus. Evil us hath in bond; By Thy grace guilt efface and respond "Forgiven!""

"O forgive! Thy sons live from Thee reft; Praised for grace, Turn thy face to those left, "Forgiven!""

"I was walking in the city the other day. I saw a syringe lying on the sidewalk. I stuck the needle in my forearm. That was a classy neighborhood, so the use of the syringe seemed justified."

"You see, the Caml garbage collector is like a god from ancient mythology: mighty, but very irritable. If you mess with it, it'll make you suffer in surprising ways."

"A few programming is taking you away from mathematics; a lot will get you back in."

"Repeat after me: "Obj.magic is not part of the OCaml language"."

"If Bordeaux red wines were carbonated, McDonald's would be a lot more interested in selling them."

"The reason why God is so great a lover of humility is because He is the great lover of truth; and humility is nothing but truth, whilst pride is nothing but lying."

"The most powerful weapon to conquer the devil is humility. For, as he does not know at all how to employ it, neither does he know how to defend himself from it."

"It is our duty to prefer the service of the poor to everything else and to offer such service as quickly as possible. If a needy person requires medicine or other help during prayer time, do whatever has to be done with peace of mind. Offer the deed to God as your prayer. Do not become upset or feel guilty because you interrupted your prayer to serve the poor. God is not neglected if you leave him for such service. One of God’s works is merely interrupted so that another can be carried out. So when you leave prayer to serve some poor person, remember that this very service is performed for God. Charity is certainly greater than any rule. Moreover, all rules must lead to charity."

"You will find out that Charity is a heavy burden to carry, heavier than the kettle of soup and the full basket. But you will keep your gentleness and your smile. It is not enough to give soup and bread. This the rich can do. You are the servant of the poor, always smiling and good-humored. They are your masters, terribly sensitive and exacting master you will see and the uglier and the dirtier they will be, the more unjust and insulting, the more love you must give them. It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them."

"However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction. He ought rather to be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of."

"The city, that monster with a hundred mouths and a thousand ears, a monster that knows nothing but says everything, had written me off."

"It is true that the environment does have an influence but what has much greater effect on the artist is love or hatred.He uses his setting to express these things."

"The only way to development(as an artist) cultivating one's own innate powers."

"One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs ."

"The great artist is conscious of the talent and power he possesses otherwise he would not see his faults and so would not be able to improve."

"Movement is the translation of life and if art depicts life,movement should come into art,since we are only aware of life,because it moves."

"On a souvent essayé de définir le Beau en art. Ce que c'est? Le beau, est ce qui paraît abominable aux yeux sans éducation."

"Ne jamais parler de soi aux autres et leur parler toujours d'eux-mêmes: c'est tout l'art de plaire. Chacun le sait et tout le monde l'oublie."

"Dans la langue de la bourgeoisie, la grandeur des mots est en raison directe de la petitesse des sentiments."

"Évidemment, les critiques n'ont été créés que le septième jour. S'ils avaient été créés le premier, qu'auraient-ils eu à faire?"

"Un livre n'est jamais un chef-d'œuvre, il le devient. Le génie est le talent d'un homme mort."

"Il n'y a que deux grands courants dans l'histoire de l'humanité: la bassesse qui fait les conservateurs et l'envie qui fait les révolutionnaires."

"S'il y a un Dieu, l'athéisme doit lui sembler une moindre injure que la religion."

"Une des joies d'orgueil de l'homme de lettres, — quand cet homme de lettres est un artiste, — c'est de sentir en lui la faculté de pouvoir immortaliser, à son gré, ce qu'il lui plait d'immortaliser. Dans ce peu de chose qu'il est, il a comme la conscience d'une divinité créatrice. Dieu crée des existences; l'homme d'imagination crée des vies fictives, qui laissent dans la mémoire du monde un souvenir plus profond, plus vécu pour ainsi dire."

"L'Anglais, filou comme peuple, est honnête comme individu. Il est le contraire du Français, honnête comme peuple et filou comme individu."

"Il y a toujours quelque chose d’absent qui me tourmente."

"The different scales, the different modes of plasticity, and gender-representation, of the three figures which make up this important group [her sculpture 'The Mature Age', commissioned in 1895, exhibited in plaster in 1899 and cast in bronze in 1902] enable a more universal thematic and metaphoric stylistics related to the ages of existence, childhood, maturity, and the perspective of the transcendent."

"The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party... loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes."

"I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly."

"I came to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. She is fond of chattering endlessly, although no-one understands her. If you ask, Grandmother, what did you say? She will look up absentmindedly and, after a while, say, oh, you’re back from school? Are you hungry? There are sweet potatoes in the bamboo steamer. When she chatters it is best not to interrupt; she is talking about when she was a young woman. But if you eavesdrop from behind her chair, she seems to be saying. It’s hidden, it’s hidden, everything is hidden, everything… All these memories are making noises in the sand under your feet."

"The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything."

"A good man never fights with a woman."

"Grandfather, when you saw the tiger were you scared? Bad people scare me, not tigers. Grandfather, have you ever run into bad people? There aren’t many tigers but lots of bad people, only you can’t shoot people."

"They say it only takes an instant to have a dream; a dream can be compressed into hardtack."

"She says she doesn’t know what to do! But he says coldly that he knows what he wants to do, but he can’t."

"Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell."

"Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience."

"Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas."

"It takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa. "Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature, don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed." "Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?" I ask. "It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance―people need to deceive themselves. We are preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re changing ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself.""

"The creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man."

"Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I may need to break away from analytical thinking; this is the cause of all my anxieties."

"Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty.____ This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations."

"I hadn't originally intended to do any reading, what if I did read one book more or one book less, whether I read or not wouldn't make a difference, I would still be waiting to get cremated."

"Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together."

"What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not exist."

"Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural."

"In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me . I know this is God."

"When God talks to humans he doesn’t want humans to hear his voice."

"Thanks to Id fans everywhere .. special mention to Mac/Linux players and European gamers."

"id is both a technology and an art company, so we try to push the art and the technology to its edge on each game, and when you're into high-tech you want to make sure your game can run on several platforms, and you have some room to experiment with several architectures. We don't want to have a basic product, get it out the door, sell as many copies as we can, and then just do the next one. Everyone's putting a lot of soul into the games, and id has got enough money overhead to decide that they can afford to have game ports to show that technology is good on Linux and on Apple hardware."

"My main problem with 64-bit binary is that it’s one extra compile to do every time you want to release binaries, so you have to maintain one build system for your 64-bit binary and then every time you have to make a build you have to make sure you get both the 32-bit and 64. Really honestly, there’s not any kind of significant performance increase. If you have good compatibility you’re able to run 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit machine, that’s the performance you get. If you run a 64-bit binary, it’s not going to make much difference. The technology is cool, but there’s really not that much point for doing it."

"It seems to be really happening. I mean, my parents are using Linux. The setup is still the tricky point, but I set the machine up last time I was in France and they've been actually catching on and start to use it. They like OpenOffice, they like having GAIM and Firefox, they're really happy with that. My brother-in-law, who's really a Windows guy, just decided to install Linux because he was tired of his machine being slow and spyware and everything. He really didn't need that much help from me to get his stuff running, doing mail and chatting and all that basic web stuff, so I guess it's really picking up."

"Most of the network related programming in games has to do with providing a good interactive experience when playing over the internet. This matter is very different from serving web pages. The primary concern there is to handle connection latency, latency fluctuations, packet loss and bandwidth limitations, and pretty much hide all of that from the player's experience."

"It seems very odd to me that content would be removed based on an individual’s personal appreciation of relevance. If the article provides useful information and references, it should at least be valued for the efforts of the contributing individuals."

"I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

"Releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform."

"[The Community's] crosses and trials give me confidence. But I derive my hope above all, and most especially, from our utter incapacity, for it is always upon nothingness that God is pleased to rear His works. If at any day we accomplish some good here, the glory will certainly be His alone, since He has employed for this end instruments more capable of spoiling everything than of making it succeed."

"We are not called upon to do all the good possible, but only that which we can do."

"You may have to wait longer than you would like, you may have to bear privations; but, bear and forebear. Have confidence in the Providence that so far has never failed us. The way is not yet clear. Grope along slowly. Do not press matters; be patient, be trustful."

"I must close now, for I am obliged to go to Terre Haute, where I am called to court to explain my conduct and defend myself against accusations relative to counterfeit money that was said to have been received from me. One has to come to America to be treated thus! Sometimes I am so disheartened with this country that I feel as if I were carrying on my shoulders the weight of its highest mountains, and in my heart all the thorns of its wilderness. Pray for me occasionally that I may not lose courage; nay, more, that I may be brave enough to hold up others who falter sometimes."

"Let us never forget that if we wish to die like the Saints we must live like them. Let us force ourselves to imitate their virtues, in particular humility and charity."

"...the Americans must have the Almighty dollar. Their cupidity renders them daring and indifferent to everything else. It is nothing to them to expose their lives and those of others in order to gain money. How materialistic these people are!"

"We have gone out several times this summer to gather simples and linden blossoms, etc. In each excursion we discover something marvelous, beautiful, and useful in the magnificent forests of Indiana. At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountifully He provides for all our wants -- I would even say for our pleasures! I love our woods and solitude very much; …"

"...they wish to make us pay taxes, which is contrary to the laws of the State. We refuse positively. It embarrasses them a little to have women resist them and speak to them about the law. Woman in this country is only yet one fourth of the family. I hope that, through the influence of religion and education, she will eventually become at least one half the "better half.""

"I have already exceeded the amount of work my head can bear."

"Come, if we have to die, let us die, but say nothing! … so true it is that misfortune binds hearts together."

"The true country of a Christian, but above all of a Religious, is Heaven, towards which we are tending; it is for God that we have made this sacrifice, and, I may add, He has already repaid us, for His protecting hand has assisted us in a visible manner, and we cannot but recognize the attentions of His Providence."

"They [Sisters of Charity in Frederick] excel in music, which is an indispensable thing in this country, even for the poor. No piano, no pupils! Such is the spirit of this country -- Music and Steam!"

"Nothing troubled the charm and silence of this solitude. Making the most serious reflections on what we behold, and on our present position, I said to myself: Thus does life also pass away, now calm, now agitated, but at last the end is attained. Happy, ah, thrice happy they who can then look out to the never-ending future with calm and confidence, who can cast themselves on the bosom of God, the Center of our felicity."

"When one has nothing more to lose, the heart is inaccessible to fear."

"As to our garden and yard, we have all the woods. And the wilderness is our only cloister, for our house is like an oak tree planted therein."

"It is astonishing that this remote solitude has been chosen for a novitiate and especially for an academy. All appearances are against it."

"My heart full of gratitude, longed to go to the sanctuary of Mary Immaculate to thank her for having granted this day of consolation to us. Happy to be free, we went straightway to the church of Our Lady of Victory, to pour out our hearts in tears of joy in the presence of our heavenly Protector and Mother."

"A bell was rung. All the passengers came on deck. Never shall I forget the scene we then witnessed. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The sky was overspread with thick dark clouds. It looked like a vast temple at night, as the fitful, lurid sun cast a yellowish tinge resembling the pale light of the tapers near a catafalque. The foaming waves opened like immense tombs that seemed avid to swallow their first victim. When all was ready a porthole was opened, and a plank painted black, six feet long and three broad, was suspended over the deep. The body of a child, wrapped in a winding sheet, was placed upon it, with a large stone attached to the feet. For a minute or two the captain read -- I do not know what prayer. Profound silence reigned. The father scarcely shed a tear. The mother seemed quite unmoved. At a word spoken by the captain, the plank was raised in the air, and the next instant the light corpse glided into the waters. I made the Sign of the Cross over it, but alas, I do not know whether the child was even baptized. The passengers withdrew, apparently untouched by the scene, and some even smiled. How impiety deadens the heart!"

"Every evening at the same hour when the weather was calm, I used to go on deck and bless God for all the wonders of His creation. I loved to consider the care of God's Providence which extends even to the little fishes."

"For true hearts there is no separating ocean; or, rather, God is their ocean, in Whom they meet and are united. They love, they lose themselves in Him."

"The most painful sight I saw in New Orleans was the selling of slaves. Every day in the streets at appointed places, negroes and negresses in holiday attire are exposed for this shameful traffic, like the meanest animals at our fairs. This spectacle oppressed my heart. Lo! I said to myself, these Americans, so proud of their liberty, thus make game of the liberty of others. Poor negroes! I would have wished to buy them all that I might say to them, "Go! Bless Providence. You are free!""

"The beauty of the forests of Indiana in the rich and lovely month of May surpasses all description. The rivers, swollen by the rains, flow through long lanes of verdure, caressing the islands they seem to carry with them in their course and which look like floating nosegays. The trees raise their straight trunks to the height of more than a hundred and twenty feet and are crowned with tops of admirable beauty. The magnolia, the dog-wood, the catalpa, covered with white flowers, the permed snow of the springtime, intermingle with the delicate green of the other trees."

"I do not wish to be labeled, at the most I can assure you that I am Aquarian in the sense that I live in the Age of Aquarius, that I am a person similar to the Aquarian type which is seen more and more in the Age of the Water Bearer."

"The problem is that many of his affirmations cannot be proven."

"Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence."

"[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis"

"The accidents of our bodily constitution can always play this revealing role on the condition that they become a means of extending our knowledge by the consciousness which we have of them, instead of being submitted to as pure facts which dominate us. Ultimately, El Greco's supposed visual disorder was conquered by him and so profoundly integrated into his manner of thinking and being that it appears finally as the necessary expression of his being much more than as a peculiarity imposed from the outside. It is no longer a paradox to say that "El Greco was astigmatic because he produced elongated bodies." Everything which was accidental in the individual, that is, everything which revealed partial and independent dialectics without relationship to the total signification of his life, has been assimilated and centered in his deeper life. Bodily events have ceased to constitute autonomous cycles, to follow the abstract patterns of biology and psychology, and have received a new meaning."

"By becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man ultimately realizes that absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and individual existence are no longer anything but objects; death is deprived of meaning. Reduced to the status of object of consciousness, the body could not be conceived as an intermediary between "things" and the consciousness which knows them."

"The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'"

"Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight present themselves in our recollection not preeminently as sensory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meets this invasion..."

"Language transcends us and yet, we speak."

"The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere."

"It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.”"

"Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement."

"Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not “a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.”"

"Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution."

"De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.”"

"Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it."

"Lichtenberg … held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. … It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was “strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations."

"Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it."

"The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history."

"Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself."

"Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden."

"Si je prends la parole, ce n'est pas pour me défendre des actes dont on m'accuse, car seule la société, qui, par son organisation, met les hommes en lutte continuelle les uns contre les autres, est responsable. En effet, ne voit-on pas aujourd'hui dans toutes les classes et dans toutes les fonctions des personnes qui désirent, je ne dirai pas la mort, parce que cela sonne mal à l'oreille, mais le malheur de leurs semblables, si cela peut leur procurer des avantages."

"Que peut-il faire celui qui manque du nécessaire en travaillant, s'il vient à chômer ? Il n'a qu'à se laisser mourir de faim. Alors on jettera quelques paroles de pitié sur son cadavre. C'est ce que j'ai voulu laisser à d'autres. J'ai préféré me faire contrebandier, faux-monnayeur, voleur, meurtrier et assassin. J'aurais pu mendier : c'est dégradant et lâche et même puni par vos lois qui font un délit de la misère. Si tous les nécessiteux, au lieu d'attendre, prenaient où il y a et par n'importe quel moyen, les satisfaits comprendraient peut-être plus vite qu'il y a danger à vouloir consacrer l'état social actuel, où l'inquiétude est permanente et la vie menacée à chaque instant."

"On finira sans doute plus vite par comprendre que les anarchistes ont raison lorsqu'ils disent que pour avoir la tranquillité morale et physique, il faut détruire les causes qui engendrent les crimes et les criminels : ce n'est pas en supprimant celui qui, plutôt que de mourir d'une mort lente par suite de privation qu'il a eues et aurait à supporter, sans espoir de les voir finir, préfère, s'il a un peu d'énergie, prendre violemment ce qui peut lui assurer le bien-être, même au risque de sa mort qui ne peut être qu'un terme à ses souffrances."

"Que faut-il alors ? Détruire la misère, ce germe de crime, en assurant à chacun la satisfaction de tous les besoins ! Et combien cela est difficile à réaliser ! Il suffirait d'établir la société sur de nouvelles bases où tout serait en commun, et où chacun, produisant selon ses aptitudes et ses forces, pourrait consommer selon ses besoins. Alors on ne verra plus des gens comme l'ermite de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce et autres mendier un métal dont ils deviennent les esclaves et les victimes ! On ne verra plus les femmes céder leurs appâts, comme une vulgaire marchandise, en échange de ce même métal qui nous empêche bien souvent de reconnaître si l'affection est vraiment sincère."

"Oui, je le répète : c'est la société qui fait les criminels, et vous jurés, au lieu de les frapper, vous devriez employer votre intelligence et vos forces à transformer la société. Du coup, vous supprimeriez tous les crimes ; et votre œuvre, en s'attaquant aux causes, serait plus grande et plus féconde que n'est votre justice qui s'amoindrit à punir les effets."

"J'ai travaillé pour vivre et faire vivre les miens ; tant que ni moi ni les miens n'avons trop souffert, je suis resté ce que vous appelez honnête. Puis le travail a manqué, et avec le chômage est venue la faim. C'est alors que cette grande loi de la nature, cette voix impérieuse qui n'admet pas de réplique : l'instinct de la conservation, me poussa à commettre certains des crimes et délits que vous me reprochez et dont je reconnais être l'auteur."

"Jugez-moi, messieurs les jurés, mais si vous m'avez compris, en me jugeant jugez tous les malheureux dont la misère, alliée à la fierté naturelle, a fait des criminels, et dont la richesse, dont l'aisance même aurait fait des honnêtes gens!"

"Une société intelligente en aurait fait des gens comme tout le monde!"

"Our activity should consist in placing ourselves in a state of susceptibility to Divine impressions, and pliability to all the operations of the Eternal Word."

"We must forget ourselves and all self-interest, and listen, and be attentive to God."

"The soul seeks God by faith, not by the reasonings of the mind and labored efforts, but by the drawings of love; to which inclinations God responds, and instructs the soul, which co-operates actively. God then puts the soul in a passive state where He accomplishes all, causing great progress, first by way of enjoyment, then by privation, and finally by pure love."

"It is a great truth, wonderful as it is undeniable, that all our happiness—temporal, spiritual, and eternal — consists in one thing; namely, in resigning ourselves to God, and in leaving ourselves with Him, to do with us and in us just as He pleases."

"Surrender yourselves then to be led and disposed of just as God pleases, with respect both to your outward and inward state."

"We must surrender our whole being to Christ Jesus, and cease to live any longer in ourselves, that He may become our life; that being dead, " our life may be hid with Christ in God.""

"True simplicity regards God alone; it has its eye fixed upon Him, and is not drawn toward self; and it is as pleased to say humble as great things. All our uneasy feelings and reflections arise from self-love, whatever appearance of piety they may assume. The lack of simplicity inflicts many wounds. Go where we will, if we remain in ourselves, we shall carry everywhere our sins and our distresses. If we would live in peace, we must lose sight of self, and rest in the infinite and unchangeable God."

"Alas, there is no French race, but a French people, a French nation, that is to say, a politically formed collectivity."

"While race has played a fundamental role in the development of the American nation, it is possible to argue that the French nation has been denned, at least in part, against racial thinking. Instead, culture, understood as a shared worldview and common customs, has come to dominate not only French self-definitions, but also French views of the rest of the world. While race has not been entirely absent from French thinking about difference, competing notions of what constitutes French culture and about who can participate in the community denned by that culture have played far more significant roles than ideas about race in debates about French identity."

"There is no French race, no French type; there is a common cultural, historical heritage that is uniquely French— but France is hybrid, whose seeds come from Asia, Africa, Europe."

"There is no French race. There is a French people made up mostly of invaders and immigrants who have become one through several thousand years of living together, fighting together, and creating together a culture, a way of life, a civilization on the same land."

"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."

"The French people were born of a Christian mother and an unknown father... I say unknown father because France is a nation of immigrants and always has been."

"The southern French people are more or less isolated from the other western European populations. They are in an intermediate position between the North Africans (Algerians from Algiers and Oran; Tunisians) and the western Europeans populations (France, Spain, and Portugal) (...) These results cannot be attributed to recent events because of the knowledge of the grandparents’ origin in our sample (...) This study reveals that the southern French population from Marseilles is related genetically to the southwestern Europeans and North Africans, who are geographically close. A substantial gene flow has thus probably been present among the populations of these neighboring areas."

"Since there is no French race, the French race cannot die. France will have the population she can feed; the French spirit will have the heirs it can win. The French population is not a matter of biology, but of economics and ideology."

"Honour to the French!—They have taken good care of the two greatest needs of human society — of good eating and citizenly equality; they have made the greatest advances in cookery and in freedom...""

"I loathe the French. There's not one French person I can think of except—maybe two very simple people. Maybe Boudin, who's so un-French. You know, they're really not very nice. They're all for themselves."

"These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians."

"There is no such thing as an "ethnic" French person. No matter how far back you trace the country's evolution, it's impossible to establish a shared ethnicity across France, and the nearer you get to the present, the more mixed it becomes. France is a hotch poth...The people you meet in France are really descendants of all the tribes and races that ever invaded France, and all the immigrants that ever flocked there from other countries. In present day France, one-third of the population has grandparents that were born outside of France...It is not a race, or a myth of common origin, that binds the French. The French are French because of the culture they share."

"The French people — there is no French race — is an amalgamation of practically all the tribes that have surged across Europe. It is a comparatively modern people formed by the fusion of numerous and diverse ethnic elements."

"I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist."

"The French are a cross-bred people; there is no such thing as a French race or a French type."

"The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living."

"Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business."

"There is no French race, for the inhabitants of France have derived their genes from three somewhat distinct sources."

"A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women."

"“This kingdom,” said Mirabeau, “is in a deplorable state. There is neither national energy, nor the only substitute for it—money.”—“It can only be regenerated,” said La Riviere, “by a conquest, like that of China, or by some great internal convulsion; but woe to those who live to see that! The French people do not do things by halves.” These words made me tremble, and I hastened out of the room."

""And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud in great power and majesty" Luke, xxi. 27. Thus, my beloved friends, shall the revolutions and kingdoms of this world be brought to a conclusion for ever. Thus shall end all the earthly pursuits which either amused us by their novelty, or seduced us by their charms. Thus shall the Son of Man come. Thus shall be ushered in the great day of his manifestation, the beginning of his reign, the complete redemption of his mystical body. On this day the consciences of all mankind shall be exposed to view a day of calamity and despair to the sinner, but of peace, joy, and consolation to the just. On this day the eternal lot of the whole world shall be decided."

"Man, during his abode in this world, knows not his own heart. Self-love spreads a veil over his imperfections, and conceals the knowledge of his true state, both from himself and from others. But on this day he shall be seen in his true dress, both by himself and by all mankind. The just man is disregarded and despised in this world: he is subjected in a great measure to the will of the sinner; his life is esteemed folly, and his end without honour. He, likewise, shall be seen in his true light on this day, and shall be honoured before the whole world with that honour to which his merits are entitled."

"In this life we never behold the true state of our interior: our attention is engaged by the few serious sentiments with which we are occasionally animated; and the judgment which we form of ourselves is generally influenced by the last impressions which are made upon our minds."

"Then shall you see the true state of your souls: then shall their secret avenues, their hidden affections, their depraved appetites, be all laid open to your view: then shall their unlawful desires, their hatreds and animosities, their vitiated and impure intentions, their criminal projects, which were overlooked because they proved abortive, and all their other vices, be displayed before you."

"The sinner is oftentimes raised to honours and dignities, whilst the just man is obliged to tread the lowly paths of subjection and submission to his orders. On this great day, these evils shall be fully rectified. The sinner shall be separated from the just, as soon as the book of conscience is displayed: and the honours and the dignities of the Heavenly Jerusalem shall be conferred on the deserving the true and faithful servants of the Lord."

"What a consolation will it be to the just, to have the secrets of their hearts finally revealed! Their perfections were concealed from men in this world. They were known to God alone. They were unknown even to themselves; for humility had concealed from their view the beauty and innocence of their interior, and had displayed before their eyes only the few blemishes and imperfections to which human nature is unavoidably exposed. But now the veil shall be withdrawn, and their secret storehouse of merits shall be thrown open to the inspection of all. With what astonishment will the great assembly of the sons of men behold the triumphs of these humble servants of God! their hitherto concealed victories over the world, the flesh, and the Devil…"

"Things will be restored to their proper order. The guilty will not triumph; will not escape the general opprobrium, nor the punishment which is due to their crimes: and an ample recompense will be given to the just man, in the clear and distinct view of an astonished and admiring universe."

"Time is short, your obligations are infinite. Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?"

"God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls."

"Admit their maxims, and the universe returns to a frightful chaos; all things are thrown into disorder upon the earth; all the notions of virtue and vice are overthrown; the most inviolable laws of society are abolished: the discipline of morality is swept away; the government of states and empires ceases to be subject to any rule; the whole harmony of political institutions is dissolved; and the human race becomes an assemblage of madmen, barbarians, cheats, unnatural wretches who have no other laws but force, no other curb than their passions and the dread of authority, no other tie than irreligion and independence, no other gods than themselves."

"It is never permissible to say, I say."

"Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong."

"How immense to us appear the sins we have not committed."

"A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it."

"Romance is the poetry of literature."

"Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them."

"Ideas are the root of creation."

"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves."

"Social intercourse, with its … hypocrisy … is highly productive of thought-hindering insincerity."

"The more a man thinks the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. Precisely. Theoretically, education is a mental training aiming at greater intellectual elasticity, but the question is whether education does not often strain, instead of train, a mind."

"Very busy people always find time for everything. Conversely, people with immense leisure find time for nothing."

"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. There exists some book, pamphlet, article in an encyclopaedia, or possibly an old clipping from a newspaper that once set you thinking; there may be many; indeed you may be one of those rare beings with whom a few lines of print are food enough or thought because, as Lamartine says, their thoughts think themselves. The sometimes evocative for you may be poetry, history, philosophy, the sciences, or moral sciences, i.e. the progress of mankind. Some people who go to sleep over a volume will be interested by a review which they think more condensed or better within their reach. Read reviews if they help you to think, that is. to say if they leave in your mind images that will go on living when you have forgotten where they came from. Read a Shakespeare calendar at the rate of four lines a day, if Shakespeare quotations have on you the magic influence they have on some people; read algebra, read the lives of great inventors or of great businessmen, read that kind of books which you and nobody else know to be thought-productive for you."

"Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. Common parlance alludes to this weakness in the frequently heard phrase: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK."

"Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions. We also forget that genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time."

"[about the Latin phrase time Jesum transeuntem et non revertentem ("Dread the passage of Jesus, for He does not return.")] This amounts to saying: do not let religious intuitions escape you, for they do not come twice."

"Every day you waste a chance, many chances in fact, of getting at your innermost consciousness by expressing yourself as you see yourself, and I say it is a pity because it makes you, year after year and day after day more like anybody else and more anonymous."

"Self-expression is individuality, and our individuality is our self, which ought to be our chief concern"

"We all more or less consciously note this. We cannot help observing that all serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy."

"Personality is the knowledge that we are apart from the rest of the universe."

"You are not to disbelieve human science or think human reason invalid except when they venture outside their province."

"Where the writer produces that combination of perfect technique, human interest, and thruth, and can add to it that supreme touch, the perfection of art has been attained."

"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul."

"All men saved from the scattering influences of society by a powerful incentive, a cause, or an ideal of individual perfection, seldom fear the danger of being distracted by comers and goers."

"The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."

"Without the aid of statistics nothing like real medicine is possible."

"Between the one who counts the facts, grouped according to their resemblance, in order to know what to believe regarding the value of therapeutic agents and him who does not count but always says "more or less frequent," there is the difference between truth and error, between something that is clear and truly scientific and something that is vague and without value—for what place is there in Science for that which is vague?"

"All [knowledge] comes from experience, it is true, but experience is nothing if it does not form collections of similar facts. Now, to make collections is to count."

"From the exposition of facts... we infer that bloodletting has had very little influence on the progress of pneumonitis, of erysipelas of the face, and of angina tonsillaris, in the cases under my observation; that its influence has not been more evident in the cases bled copiously and repeatedly, than in those bled only once and to a small amount; that, we do not at once arrest inflammations, as is too often fondly imagined; that, in cases where appears to be otherwise, it is undoubtedly owing, either to an error in diagnosis, or to the fact that the bloodletting was practised at an advanced period of the disease, when it had nearly run its course; that, it would be well, nevertheless, in inflammations of imminent hazard, pneumonitis, for instance, to try whether a first bleeding sufficient to produce syncope, from twenty-five to thirty ounces or more, would not be attended with greater success; and finally that, wherever I have been able to compare the effect of general, with that of local bleeding by leeches, the superiority of the former has appeared to me demonstrated."

"In any epidemic... let us suppose five hundred of the sick, taken indiscriminately, to be subjected to one kind of treatment, and five hundred others, taken in the same manner, to be treated in a different mode; if the mortality is greater among the first, than among the second, must we not conclude that the treatment was less appropriate, or less efficacious in the first class, than in the second ? It is unavoidable; for among so large a collection, similarities of condition will necessarily be met with, and all things being equal, except the treatment, the conclusion will be rigorous."

"The objection made to the numerical method, to wit, the difficulty or impossibility of forming classes of similar facts, is alike applicable to all the methods that might be substituted; that it is impossible to appreciate each case with mathematical exactness, and it is precisely on this account that enumeration becomes necessary; by so doing, the errors, (which are inevitable,) being the same in two groups of patients subjected to different treatment, mutually compensate each other, and they may be disregarded without sensibly affecting the exactness of the results."

"Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis should be honored as a primary author of the "numerical method." By "numerical method" he meant that the stages of disease and therapeutic outcomes should be expressed in terms of numbers and not merely as a set of verbal descriptions. ...This method seems so sensible that it is difficult to see why it was resisted by the medical establishment."

"By the middle of the 1830s the numerical method, which Louis enshrined as the doctrinal heart of his new Société médicale d'observation, had become probably the most fiercely contested proposition in all of French medicine."

"[John P.] Bull... wrote his history of the clinical trial in 1951. He argued that the conduct of "clinical trials" can be traced to the ancient Egyptians. ...Highlighting historic events—such as Avicenna's rules for testing drugs, Francis Bacon's suggestion of a committee of physicians to judge therapeutic efficacy, James Lind's comparative trial of scurvy "cures", and P.C.A. Louis's application of his numerical method in the clinic—Bull presents a linear account of the development of the clinical trial. The implication... is that, cumulatively, these historic experiments made the clinical trial progressively more scientific."

"P. Ch. A. Louis, physician of the Hospital de la Pitié, is a man, whose labors and whose writings must become more and more known for ages. I should deem it service enough to my brethren in this country, if I could induce them, one and all, to read and study the works of this great pathologist. M. Louis is the founder of the numerical system, as it has been denominated, in respect to the science of medicine. ...M. Louis has not brought forward a new system of medicine; he has only proposed and pursued a new method in prosecuting the study of medicine. This is nothing else than the method of induction, the method of Bacon, so much vaunted and yet so little regarded. ...To estimate the value of his observations, it is necessary to understand the plan, on which he collected them. First, then, he ascertained when the patient under his examination began to be diseased. Not satisfied with vague answers, he went back to the period, when the patient enjoyed his usual health; and he also endeavored to learn whether that usual health had been firm, or in any respect infirm. He noted also the age, occupation, residence, and manner of living of the patient; likewise any accidents which had occurred, and which might have influenced the disease then affecting him. He ascertained also, as much as possible, the diseases which had occurred in the family of his patient. Secondly, he inquired into the present disease, ascertaining not only what symptoms had marked its commencement, but those which had been subsequently developed and the order of their occurrence; and recording those, which might not seem to be connected with the principal disease, as well as those which were so connected; also, measuring the degree or violence of each symptom, with as much accuracy as the case would admit. Thirdly, he noted the actual phenomena present at his examination, depending for this not only on the statement of the patient, but on his own senses, his eyes, his ears and his hands. Under this and the preceding head he was not satisfied with noting the functions, in which the patient complained of disorder, but examined carefully as to all the functions, recording their state as being healthy or otherwise, and even noticing the absence of symptoms, which might bear on the diagnosis. Thus all secondary diseases, and those, which accidentally co-existed with the principal malady, were brought under his view. Fourthly, he continued to watch his patient from day to day, carefully recording all the changes, which occurred in him till his restoration to health, or his decease. Fifthly, in the fatal cases he exercised the same scrupulous care in examining the dead, as he had in regard to the living subject. Prepared by a minute acquaintance with anatomy, and familiar with the changes wrought by disease, he looked not only at the parts where the principal disorder was manifested, but at all the organs. His notes did not state opinions, but facts. He recorded in regard to each part, which was not quite healthy in its appearance, the changes in color, consistence, firmness, thickness, &c.; not contenting himself with saying that a part was inflamed, or was cancerous, or with the use of any general, but indefinite terms."

"He studies nature with a full faith in the uniformity of her laws, and in the certainty that truth may be ascertained by diligent labor. It is truth only he loves; not anxious to build up a system, nor pretending to explain every thing, he says to his pupils, such and such have been my observations; you can observe as well as I, if you will study the art of observation, and if you will come to it with an honest mind, and be faithful in noting all which you discover, and not merely the things which are interesting at the moment, or those which support a favorite dogma; I state to you the laws of nature as they appear to me; if true, your observations will confirm them; if not true, they will refute them; I shall be content if only the truth be ascertained."

"My sole expectation is to lead some, who might otherwise be ignorant of them, among my brethren of the present day, to study works which I esteem as among the most valuable certainly, if not the most valuable, which any age has furnished us in regard to medicine. ...these principles may be added to, they may be enlarged, limited and modified, and yet the system may be maintained; and it will still derive its support from the first labors devoted to its erection as much as from the last."

"Italy is, after France and perhaps in the same degree, the land in which love of country has the deepest roots in the hearts of its inhabitants. The fact is that perhaps nowhere else has nature been so prodigal with its enchantments and seductions. Therefore, although Italy has been, since the fall of the Caesars, the object of European covetousness, the eternal battlefield of powerful neighbors, and the theatre of the fiercest and most prolonged civil wars, her children have always refused to leave her. Save for some commercial colonies hastily thrown upon the shores of Asia by Genoa and Venice, history has not, in fact, recorded in Italy any important outward movement of population."

"If young people don’t like reading, let’s not blame television or the modern world or school. Or rather, blame them all, but only after asking what we have done to that ideal reader since the days when we played at being both storyteller and book."

"Schools everywhere have always confined themselves to making students learn techniques and write essays, while proscribing treading for pleasure. It seems to be established in perpetuity, in every part of the world, that enjoyment has no part to play in the curriculum, and that knowledge can only be the fruit of suffering."

"A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself. -David Pennac"

"They flattered the ambitious and all the ills came gradually to a head. Murder drowning everything was allowed. Intriguers monopolised all the offices. Good men could only mutter for if they spoke they were lost. Hatred vengeance everything was permitted and nobody dared open his mouth..."

"When I am with old friends... We recount what we have seen what we have felt the good and the evil that the Revolution has done all the assaults the days the nights the punishments and the fate of our unfortunate friends who perished in the time of Terror when good men feared for their lives We are beginning to see the twilight of the times in which our families were happy."

"The French breathed blood. They were like cannibals."

"Perhaps because his own father had been brutal towards him and his mother had died while he was a child, Ménétra had clear assumptions about the roles father and mother should play: the former as the source of authority, punishment and advice, the latter of affection and imagination."

"Art is the illusion of disorientation, the illusion of liberty, the illusion of presence, the illusion of the sacred, the illusion of Nature. ... Not the painting of Buren, Mosset, Parmentier or Toroni.... Art is a distraction, art is false. Painting begins with Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni."

"My painting, at the limit, can only signify itself... It is. So much so, and so well, that anyone can make it and claim it... Perhaps the only thing that one can do after having seen a canvas like ours is total revolution."

"Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint. I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow. The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence."

"Every act is political and, whether one is conscious of it or not, the presentation of one's work is no exception. Any production, any work of art is social, has a political significance. We are obliged to pass over the sociological aspect of the proposition before us due to lack of space and consideration of priority among the questions to be analysed."

"The work of art... in seemingly by-passing all difficulties, attains full freedom, thus in fact nourishing the prevailing ideology. It functions as a security valve for the system, an image of freedom in the midst of general alienation and finally as a bourgeois concept supposedly beyond all criticism, natural, above and beyond all ideology."

"More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art. Here, the Documenta team, headed by , exhibits (artworks) and exposes itself (to critiques)."

"Every place radically imbues (formally, architecturally, sociologically, politically) with its meaning the object (work creation) shown there. Art in general refuses to be implied a priori and so pretends to ignore or reject the draconian role imposed by the museum (the gallery), a role both cultural and architectural. To reveal this limit (this role), the object presented and its place of display must dialectically imply one another"

"When we say architecture, we include the social, political and économie context. Architecture of any sort is in fact the inévitable background, support and frame of any work."

"I agree with Rosenberg’s text that says anything is art as soon as it is put in a museum. And that is why artists are such appalling things, since they are responsible for this state of affairs in art."

"Duchamp realized that there was something false in art, but his limitation was that, rather than demystifying, he amplified it. By taking a manufactured object and placing it out of context, he quite simply symbolized art. His actions tended to “represent” and not “present” the object. Duchamp, like all artists, could not “present” anything at all without “re-presenting” it. And if he symbolized art in this way, it was because as soon as he exhibited a bottle rack, a shovel, or a urinal, he was really stating that anything was art as soon as you pointed at it. By extension, and this is very important, that means that a cow in a field becomes art in a painting, a tree by Courbet becomes art, and a woman by Rubens becomes art; now this cow, this tree, and this woman exist in another way. Duchamp dismantled this process supposedly to take away its sanctity, but he went about it in such a way that by being against art, he was in art. Let’s clarify an important point right away: Duchamp is not anti-art. He belongs to art. The art of extolling the consumer society."

"Putting a shovel in a gallery or museum signified “this shovel has become art.” And it actually was. The action itself is art, because the artist projects himself in choosing the shovel, and especially in placing it out of context. It is art in the sense that the imprint of a hand in a cave is art, the Mona Lisa is art, a happening is art, etc. It is a problem that touches on the ethics and function of the artist: he assumes the right to have this supra-human calling that allows him to say to others, “everything that I touch with my hand is transformed into art.” The artist imposes his anguish, his vision of the world, and himself on others. The artist emasculates the observer. Maybe he thinks that the latter deserves no better . . . The artist assumes the right to show you what you can see for yourself, what you could obviously see much more clearly without his intervention. I contest this right."

"A homeostat constantly seeks to establish a balance which is perpetually disrupted, and performs a statistical exploration of all the possible combinations of inputs."

"Aesthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous aesthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment,"

"As was the case with other artists, Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics," published in 1948, was to have great significance for the work of Nicolas Schöffer. On reading it he made his first acquaintance with the science in the making, and he was later to incorporate cybernetic concepts in several of his most interesting works. Schoffer's application of cybernetics — which Wiener defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine"-postulated that the behaviour of a mobile sculpture would be influenced by the behaviour of the spectator and by the environment in accordance with a fixed pattern and this would in turn influence the spectator."

"Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) formulated his idea of a kinetic art that was not only active and reactive, like the work of his contemporaries, but also autonomous and proactive, in Paris in the 1950s. He developed sculptural concepts he called Spatiodynamism (1948)."

"Hungarian-born artist Nicolas Schöffer created his first cybernetic sculptures CYSP 0 and CYSP I (the titles of which combined the first two letters of “cybernetic” and “spatio-dynamique”) in 1956."

"In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as , Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century."

"The day will be hard."

"O death, why art thou so long in coming?"

"We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours ... Damiens was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. ... I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited."

"One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man says, all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies? I am not a scholar. 'Listen once again then, Jacques!' said the man with the restless hand and the craving air. 'The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was all done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full eager attention to the last – to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed!'"

"When the four limbs had been pulled away, the confessors came to speak to him; but his executioner told them that he was dead, though the truth was that I saw the man move, his lower jaw moving from side to side as if he were talking. One of the executioners even said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to throw it on the stake, he was still alive. The four limbs were untied from the ropes and thrown on the stake set up in the enclosure in line with the scaffold, then the trunk and the rest were covered with logs and faggots, and fire was put to the straw mixed with this wood."

"The world was rightly horrified by America’s recent blunder in bombing the Médecins sans Frontières’ hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. But how many Syrian Kunduzes will result from Russian airstrikes if the Kremlin continues to favor bombs over guided missiles?"

"Yes. We have, in France, a real tradition of what Jean Paul Sartre, in the foreword of a book of his friend Roger Stéphane, called l’aventurier. Lawrence of Arabia, Byron, Andre Malraux. And for me, l’aventurier was a very honourable destiny. To write and to act … To live your life far from yourself, far from you bases ... To change yourself deeply … All these were real targets for me. Life is worth being lived if one takes the risk and the chance of being different than himself. To break the ropes which tie you to your place. To break the rules of your natural group. To convert yourself into something else. To change your soul.And not to do what you were formatted, shaped to do. I was shaped to be a professor, I was shaped to be just a writer. And then, Bangladesh happened."

"Moreover, you know … mass murder, slaughter, is often an abstract thing. But when you happen to see it directly, to be a witness of it, it’s something quite different, you cannot just play games. It changes you deeply. And you are compelled to do something. The last weeks of 71, November to mid December, were among the most moving, disturbing and terrible I have experienced in my whole life. I saw things I should not have seen. I saw things a man should not see. But I saw them."

"I assert that Pakistan is the biggest rogue of all the rogue states of today. I assert that what is taking form there, between Islamabad and Karachi, is a black hole compared to which Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad was an obsolete weapons dump."

"I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism. I am the contemporary of a strange twilight when the clouds above are dissolving amid the clash of arms and the cries of the tortured. The only revolution I know, the one which may grant notoriety to this century, is the Nazi plague and red fascism. Hitler did not die in Berlin. Conqueror of his conquerors, he won the war in the stormy night into which he plunged Europe. Stalin did not die in Moscow nor at the Twentieth Congress. He is here among us, a stowaway in the history that he still haunts and bends to his mad will. You say the world is doing well? It's certain in any case that it keeps on going, since it isn't changing. But never before has the will to death become so nakedly and cynically unleashed. For the first time the gods have left us, no doubt weary of wandering on the plain of ashes where we have made our home. And I am writing in an age of Barbarism which is already, silently, remaking the world of men."

"The French playboy philosopher, who toppled Gaddafi, ponders the big questions. And fervently supports Israel."

"The soul which stops at creatures delays the course of the voyage by which it moves toward God; and by desiring to enjoy them, it proportionately deprives itself of the enjoyment of God."

"Jesus ... never laughed. Nothing has ever equaled the seriousness of his life; it is clear that pleasure, recreation, anything that could divert the mind, had no part in it. The life of Jesus was utterly taut, wholly caught up in God and in the woes of men, and he gave to nature only what he could not have refused it without destroying it."

"Sins which would terrify us if they were peculiar to ourselves alone cease to frighten us when they are shared. The sinner sleeps soundly when he finds himself surrounded by a multitude, as though God were obliged to spare him."

"Not only do we have no real right to the things of the world, because belonging always essentially to God they can never belong to creatures; but we are also limited by the laws of God in the use of those possessions; for it must not be imagined that God gives them to us so that we may dispose of them as we wish. He is too just to have made such an unequal distribution. These goods being the means destined by his Providence for the subsistence of men, he gives to some more than they need only so that they may distribute it to others. A rich man, in so far as he is rich, is thus no more than steward of God's good things."

"Peace for Paris"

"This is what I do, I draw, I reacted graphically, just drawing something spontaneously with pen and paper and then sharing it as a raw reaction. With so much violence and tragedy — we just want a bit of peace."

"I do graphics commercially for a living, but when I get affected by things, when something happens in the world, I usually communicate online with my drawings."

"I just wanted something symbolic, something that everybody could understand easily, and everybody could share regardless of where they’re from and whether they’re a keen observer of illustration usually. I just wanted something universal. … a few people from different places follow my work, and I enjoy communicating to them, usually for happier reasons. What I do in general is try to communicate with people — and I’m aware that the more you want to communicate to a larger audience, the more universal and simple you have to be. It’s an image for everyone. It’s not my image — it’s not a piece of work that I’m proud of or anything — I didn’t create it to get credit or benefit from it. I just wanted to express myself, and from experience I know that through social media people like expressing themselves, or need to express themselves. It is somehow quite organic, the way these things go — you can’t really plan on it. I would just say that if people have used it so much, and if they felt like it was useful for them to share, then the image worked and I’m happy, so to speak, even though happiness is not really a thought that springs to my mind in such horrible times."

"The image started showing up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram within hours of the attacks in Paris: a simple, slightly off-kilter rendering of the Eiffel Tower framed by a circle so as to look like a peace sign. Most people who shared the image, which has since become the dominant visual symbol of grief over the attacks, probably didn’t know where it originated, or who was responsible for coming up with it.… the creator of the drawing was a French illustrator named Jean Jullien, who posted it to his Twitter page around midnight Paris-time with the caption “Peace for Paris,” and watched it swiftly take flight. Jullien, whose work tends to be marked by a light touch and a breezy, sometimes high concept sense of humor, has made a habit of reacting to the news in graphic form before, drawing pictures to mark the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the legalization of gay marriage in Ireland, and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last January."

"In the wake of Friday night’s Paris attacks, which left over 120 people dead in six incidents around the city, one poignant sketch began circulating social media to honor the victims. The symbol, including Paris’ iconic Eiffel Tower in the form of a peace sign, shows solidarity with the French capital and has been shared widely along with the hashtags #PrayforParis and #jesuisparis"

"Just in case our enemies needed another reason to despise us, today the inactivist group Somnolent Tilty-Headed Wankers for Peace launched an exciting new graphic: the same old clapped-out hippie peace symbol but incorporating the Eiffel Tower (right)! Isn't that a cool, stylish way of showing how saddy-saddy-sadcakes you are about all those corpses in the streets of Paris? It's already gone viral! And that's all that matters, isn't it? Our enemies use social media to distribute snuff videos as a means of recruitment. We use it to confirm to them how passive and enervated we are: What was it the last time blood ran in the streets of Paris? Oh, yeah, a pencil - for all those dead cartoonists. But, given that blood in the streets of Paris looks like becoming a regular event, it helps to have something of general application. What about, ooh, a tricolor with a blue tear at the end? No, better yet: a peace symbol with a croissant in the middle. No, wait... What's that? All you are saying is give peace a chance? But what, in fact, are the chances of peace for Paris and France? What are the odds? Oh, sorry. All they were saying is give peace a chance. And, having said it, they've gone back to sleep until the next atrocity requires another stupid hashtag or useless avatar. Parisians should be revolted by this third-rate gimmick, and revile those who created and promoted it."

"At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small."

"It has been easy to settle in."

"I honesty thought it was over."

"Sometimes I think someone upstairs saved me from being ordinary."

"... selon le mot de Talleyrand, la trahison est une question de dates ..."

"En politique, a dit Anatole France, il n'y a pas de traîtres; il n'y a que des perdants."

"The last two centuries were familiar with the myth of progress. Our own century has adopted the myth of modernity. The one myth has replaced the other. ... Men ceased to believe in progress; but only to pin their faith to more tangible realities, whose sole original significance had been that they were the instruments of progress. ...This exaltation of the present ... is a corollary of that very faith in progress which people claim to have discarded. The present is superior to the past, by definition, only in a mythology of progress. Thus one reatins the corollary while rejecting the principle. There is only one way of retaining a position of whose instability one is conscious. One must simply refrain from thinking—and surrender oneself to the vortex of the corollary."

"The vulgarity of the myth of modernity is plainly revealed by the preeminence in its mythology of the factors of quantity; to be modern is always to beat the record in some respect. Distinction, therefore, is opposed to modernity as quality is to quantity."

"The first of men did no more than take the fruit of the tree, and that, we are told, was sin. Modern humanity "tortures the tree in order the sooner to obtain its fruit.""

"To have lived a full life is to have learned to love, that is, to give greatly. It is to have learned how to make the gesture that some scholars have called oblative, opposing this term to captative; as though contrasting the gesture of offering with the gesture of seizing."

"I meet men all the time who can bench 400 pounds but can't climb up through a window to pull someone from a burning building. I know guys who can run marathons but can't sprint to anyone's rescue unless they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every day but can't dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks and out of the surf."

"Oxygen is an accident. Breath is intentional."

"Do we function in sets of ten in the wilderness? How do we know how long we will have to do something?"

"Adaptability is the holy grail of MovNat. This is what we have done throughout human history. But we have lost touch with the world that created us."

"We're all zoo humans to some extent, even me."

"Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake. That's how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff-- you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you're screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise."

""How would you train a panther to be fit? Not on a treadmill."

"A tiger is a powerful, graceful animal simply by doing what a tiger does. This practical, real world approach is what we have lost, and what natural movement can restore."

"It was all practical stuff. Why? Because that's the way you train soldiers: practical stuff. Soldiers don't freaking need to do a flag, you don't need to do handstands. You need to run and sprint and vault over obstacles. They need to balance on stuff, and they need to climb to crawl to lift and carry, throw and catch. They need to do all these things. They need to fight, to swim."

"You never see your dog running nonstop around and around in a circle for an hour. If he did, you'd think there was something wrong with him. Instead, he'll chase something, roll around, sprint, rest, mix things up. Animal play has a purpose, and it's not hard to surmise that human play should as well."

"You need to have a mind-body-nature connection."

"Natural Movement is the universal workout the world has forgotten."

"If you want to become a force of nature, you need to interact with the forces of nature."

"You can never master the context where you physically and mentally operate; you can only learn to master how you will operate through it."

"No jump is good if the landing is bad."

"When he was a teenager, Le Corre excelled in sports such as karate, but none of it felt quite right. He became cross when he didn’t win. This all changed when, at the age of 19, he joined a group practising a form of street running called Combat Vital. Under cover of darkness they would scale the bridges of Paris, swim in the Seine, run barefoot through the streets and jump over the rooftops like cats."

"We run as Erwan instructed. Or at least try. We're supposed to run elegantly, like an animal. Keep the muscles relaxed, lean forward, and let gravity pull you ahead. Don't stomp-- take short steps and land lightly on your toes. Don't pump your arms, just let them dangle naturally by your side."

"Le Corre taught us to expend as little energy as possible while completing a challenge. That meant learning how to move efficiently."

"Everybody says, 'I'm in shape, or I'm out of shape,' " he tells his students..."Everybody's in shape. You've been shaped," he says, curving his back to model the slumpy posture of the average office worker. "That's your shape."

"Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences."

"It is a specious but very false reason to allege that, since man has acquired this taste, he ought to be permitted to indulge it — in the first place because Nature has not given him cooked flesh, and because several ages must have rolled away before fire was used. … Nature, then, could have given man only raw or living flesh, and we know that it is repugnant to him over the whole extent of the earth."

"Man is neither carnivorous nor herbivorous. He has neither the teeth of the cud-chewers, nor their four stomachs, nor their intestines. If we consider these organs in man, we must conclude him to be by nature and origin frugivorous, as is the ape."

"Has anyone ever known a school to organize a field trip to a slaughterhouse? Never. Why? Where does this sense of shame come from that obliges us to keep silent in front of our children about the fate that we impose on animals? Throat-cutting, electrocution, and evisceration—are these scenes that would be obscene in the eyes of innocents? The answer is yes."

"I'd rather skate naked than wear fur."

"I don’t know if race made it more difficult, but definitely it made me stronger, knowing that I [had] no excuse [for] making mistakes or being kind of so-so, because maybe I [wouldn’t] be accepted as a white person [would’ve been]. But if [I was] better, they had no choice but to accept it and say, ‘She did so well.’"

"Altars are profaned and broken, Christians tortured, women violated. ... Who will avenge these wrongs? On you, rests this duty, on you. ... That which above all other thoughts should stir you most is the Holy Sepulchre of the Savior and the Holy Places, ravaged and profaned by an impure race. Valiant soldiers, descendants of those who never know defeat, make your way to the Holy Sepulchre and tear the Holy Land from the grasp of this abominable nation."

"The church shall be catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power."

"Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban."

"...the most telling aspect of the First Crusade was that this mighty wave of military enthusiasm owed nothing whatever to any king or emperor. The Pope had summoned the chivalry of Europe round the banner of the cross and St Peter, to overwhelming effect. No secular ruler could have done as much, and there could be no more eloquent demonstration of the centrality of the reformed papacy in the religious imagination of medieval Europe."

"It was at Clermont where, before a Council of several hundred prelates and thousands of clergy and laymen, he delivered a plea for united Christendom, a holy unity which would liberate the precious Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christendom which would defeat and throw off the shameful yoke of oppression. He spoke well, his theme was magnificent, and the moment was propitious. ... His audience wept and groaned in sympathy and with the vast sorrow and deep anger a mighty enthusiasm was born. ... "Who will avenge these wrongs?" cried the Pope with all the power of a flaming conscience. "On you rests this duty...on you!" "God wills it!" shouted his audience in wild excitement. "God wills it." The First Crusade was born."

"Urban spoke with fervour and with all the art of a great orator. The response was immediate and tremendous. Cries of 'Deus le volt!'—'God wills it!'—interrupted the speech. Scarcely had the Pope ended his words before the Bishop of Le Puy rose from his seat and, kneeling before the throne, begged permission to join in the holy expedition. Hundreds crowded up to follow his example. Then the Cardinal Gregory fell on his knees and loudly repeated the Confiteor; and all the vast audience echoed it after him. When the prayer was over Urban rose once more and pronounced the absolution and bade his hearers go home."

"Peace! Following my long-term service, it became clear to me that peace is to be built in peaceful times, rather than in the times of war."

"This cosmic character of Salvatore Garau's figurative world, this emotionalized universalism links his aesthetics with the tradition of romanticism, especially of romantic landscape painting, in which imposing natural phenomena are interpreted as a metaphor for the cosmos and the metaphysical hierarchy of existence."

"Salvatore Garau, triumph of immediacy, aesthetic enjoyment, power of color, free spontaneity, a call to something gigantic, powerful, improbable, to something absent but substantial; this is what manifests itself in the new, small, enigmatic sheets that Salvatore Garau dedicated to Richard Wagner. The movement of the stripes of color - pulsating, restless, unpredictable, paths of unstoppable energies and tensions - suggest wind and flames, bodies that contort and interpenetrate, full of power and sensual force [...] seductive and disturbing are not however dedicated only to Richard Wagner [...] features that are not secondary to understand his poetics, in which an obsessive monochromatism, made up of shades of red, seems to evoke the spirit of the mythical struggles of the heroes of Wagner."

"In the works of Salvatore Garau, spaces of structures that shake with movements reminiscent of strong winds, earthquakes, or architectural formations, and that, in maintaining clarity and geometric objectivity, relate to the play of emotions in a frenzy that can be disturbing, unconscious, and irrational."

"What was my surprise to see him get out of his carriage, sheathed to the hips in thick boots, and his chest trapped in a suroît that sailors don on stormy days. From his chin hung a long pocket of oilcloth tied with cords to his large felt hat."

"In front of this outfit I no longer keep my seriousness. I burst out laughing."

"They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that they first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians were like wood or like lead.We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit: the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ... We know all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the Normans in England.Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still strongest in it. Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what Rouen was—all that has never been properly written down at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion.Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied nowhere else. He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French. He was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was Norman: the regularity, the suddenness, the achievement, and, when the short fighting was over, the creation of a new society. It was the Norman who began everything over again—the first fresh influence since Rome.The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in 1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, and a slow manner; their houses were of wood : sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height, there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch of time—less than the time that separates us to-day from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St. Edmunds, 'unworthy,' they said, 'of a great saint,' and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Alban's; in 1079 Winchester. Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham. ... And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.Were they not indeed a people? ...One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round shaft of the pillar—more like a drum than like a column. They could build, as it were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty."

"“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”"

"Kind hearts are more than coronets, ⁠ And simple faith than Norman blood."

"Do you realize that we are the only people on the planet to see these things?"

"There are people who claim that I have taken from you everything. What I have taken I haven't taken for me, since I leave everything behind. But I will leave nothing behind, I will leave ashes, I will leave nothing to the bastards who have betrayed us. The harm they have done to the Rosy Cross, that I cannot forgive. What they have done to me doesn't matter, but the harm they have done to the Rosy Cross I won't forgive. I cannot."

"We are rejected by the whole world. First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our Earth, fortunately she rejects us. How would we leave [otherwise]? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave... life for me is intolerable, intolerable, I can't go on. So think about the dynamic that will get us to go elsewhere."

"We don't know when they might close the trap on us… a few days? A few weeks? We are being followed and spied upon in our every move. All the cars are equipped with tracing and listening devices. All of their most sophisticated techniques are being used on us. While in our house, beware of surveillance cameras, lasers and infra-red. Our file is the hottest on the planet, the most important of the last ten years, if not the century. However that may be, as it turns out, the concentration of hate against us will give us enough energy to leave."

"Di Mambro: People have beaten us to the punch, you know."

"Space is curved, time comes to an end... Our cycle is over, these images tell all. [...] The good-hearted man can live in this precise second... a sublime event: the passage of the cycle of Adamic man towards a new cycle of evolution, programmed on another earth, an earth prepared to receive the stored vibrations enriched by the authentic servants of the Rosy Cross."

"I think the people who claim that Di Mambro was a conman are right. I think that the people who claimed that Di Mambro was convinced about his spiritual message are right too. Di Mambro was just a kind of complex personality, actually a kind of schizophrenic and disturbed personality. The major, the terrible consequence of it, is that it is a total loss of reality and the dream world he elaborated was shared with several people, who more and more entered into his delusions."

"In 1984 I met him, he was maybe one of the last conscious persons on earth. He moved with the forces, it was that simple. I don't like to use the word 'power'."

"[Di Mambro] explained to us that one day we'd all be called to a meeting at which a transit would be accomplished. It had to do with a mission, with a departure towards Jupiter.... He said to his listeners that they had to be on call twenty-four hours a day so as not to miss the departure and that once the order was given, we would have to move quickly."

"Akhnaton, of course, was Di Mambro. Di Mambro was Akhnaton, Moses, Cagliostro, Osiris. He used to say, "You understand, in all my incarnations I always had to fight, because my spiritual development was always so far in advance of the time when I was living.""

"But interestingly, for the members of the group, the real charismatic personality was Jo DiMambro. Now when I look at the video recordings of Jo DiMambro's lectures, it is just disastrous. He wasn't an eloquent speaker. But when I spoke with former members, and I told them that, they were just incredulous. Jo DiMambro, they would say, he was brilliant, he was extraordinary, and so on, because those people invested him with the qualities of a cosmic master."

"DiMambro had created a kind of virtual reality around himself. He only saw people who accepted everything he demanded. He didn't very much like people contradicting him. He was also trying to cultivate relationships with some other occult orders around the world. He was developing a fantasy world, and suddenly people in the core group put that into question --suggesting that actually this world he had created around himself doesn't exist."

"[Di Mambro] could have reached the end of his rope. He could be at the end in terms of health. He could be at the end in financial terms. He could be harassed by people who want money. He could be at the end on the level of the sect— there was a loss of members, loss of support, abandonment by his close relatives."

"Joseph courant à perdre haleine à mes côtés, avant qu'un obus nous fracasse, c'est le souvenir le plus fort qu'il me reste de lui. Un garçon qui a peur."