All Quotes

"Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48)"

"And so the Age of Enlightenment, which for Kant marks ‘the emancipation of humanity from a state of minority’, reveals itself to be much more backward, obsessive and persecutory towards masturbation than previous centuries, which were governed by religion, which perhaps, more than reason, is familiar with the flesh and the sufferings of its loneliness. (p. 50)"

"Looking at man and looking at art, we must focus our eyes on their “belonging together”, because isolating man from his spiritual expression means reducing him to the condition of an animal, just as isolating art from man means making it twirl in the realm of the spirit, forgetting the material depth in which art, like man, takes shape and form. (p. 140)"

"“'Myth is the search for origin”', its revival and re-proposal, “”religion is the announcement of redemption, its figures are hope and faith in what is to come. [...] Where religion intersects with myth, myth dies out. (p. 65)"

"This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”."

"Ethics, when faced with technology, becomes pathetic: we have never seen impotence capable of stopping power. The problem is not what we can do with the technical tools we have devised, but what technology can do to us."

"Reason is no longer the immutable order of the cosmos in which first mythology, then philosophy and finally science were reflected, creating their respective cosmologies, but becomes an “instrumental procedure” that guarantees the most economical calculation between the means available and the objectives to be achieved. (p. 38)"

"Truth is no longer conformity to the order of the cosmos or of God because, if there is no longer a horizon capable of guaranteeing the eternal framework of immutable order, if the order of the world no longer dwells in its being but depends on “technical doing”, “effectiveness” explicitly becomes the only criterion of truth. (p. 38)"

"Umberto Galimberti, Cristianesimo. La religione dal cielo vuoto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-07-17222-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-81642-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell'occidente, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-428-0386-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger e il nuovo inizio . Il pensiero al tramonto dell'Occidente, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2020. ISBN 978-88-07-10553-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-17162-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-84027-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, Idee: il catalogo è questo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-81527-0."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il corpo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2013. ISBN 978-88-07-88237-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il gioco delle opinioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-81800-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il libro delle emozioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2021. ISBN 978-88-07-17400-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine, Apogeo, Milano, 2008. ISBN 978-88-503-2717-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Paesaggi dell'anima, Mondadori, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-04-42130-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne. L'uomo nell'età della tecnica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1999. ISBN 88-07-10257-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psichiatria e fenomenologia, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2006. ISBN 88-07-81932-5."

"Umberto Galimberti, Umberto Galimberti racconta Freud, Jung e la psicoanalisi, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, Roma, 2011."

"From 1967 to 1973 Haksar, a former protégé of Krishna Menon, was Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted adviser. One of her biographers, Katherine Frank, describes him as ‘a magnetic figure’ who became ‘probably the most influential and powerful person in the government’ as well as ‘the most important civil servant in the country’. Haksar set out to turn a civil service which, at least in principle, was politically neutral into an ideologically ‘committed bureaucracy’. His was the hand that guided Mrs Gandhi through her turn to the left, the nationalization of the banks and the split in the Congress Party. It was Haksar also who was behind the transfer of control of the intelligence community to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. His advocacy of the leftward turn in Mrs Gandhi’s policies sprang, however, from his socialist convictions rather than from manipulation by the KGB. But both he and Mrs Gandhi ‘were less fastidious than Nehru had been about interfering with the democratic system and structure of government to attain their ideological ends’. The journalist Inder Malhotra noted the growth of a ‘courtier culture’ in Indira Gandhi’s entourage: ‘The power centre in the world’s largest democracy was slowly turning into a durbar.’"

"In the early 1970s, the KGB presence in India became one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the KGB and GRU as many cover positions as they wished. Nor, like many other states, did India object to admitting Soviet intelligence officers who had been expelled by less hospitable regimes. The expansion of KGB operations in the Indian subcontinent (and first and foremost in India) during the early 1970s led the FCD to create a new department. Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of non-Communist South and South-East Asia, had been the responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge of the Indian subcontinent."

"The KGB, in Kalugin’s view, was more successful than the CIA, partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime. As Inder Malhotra noted, though corruption was not new in India: People expected Indira Gandhi’s party, committed to bringing socialism to the country, to be more honest and cleaner than the old undivided Congress. But this turned out to be a vain hope. On the contrary, compared with the amassing of wealth by some of her close associates, the misdeeds of the discarded Syndicate leaders, once looked upon as godfathers of corrupt Congressmen, began to appear trivial."

"Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member S. K. Patil is reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases... The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, who – though she doubtless did not realize it – also accepted Soviet money. On at least one occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs Gandhi. Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle, depended on the money he collected from a variety of sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford depended on government favours."

"The greatest successes of Soviet active measures in India remained the exploitation of the susceptibility of Indira Gandhi and her advisers to bogus CIA conspiracies against them."

"India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the world, though their significance appears to have been considerably exaggerated by the Centre, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion."

"Not everybody naman wants to celebrate ostentatiously or ‘yong sobra sobra. ‘Yong iba, mayroon lang silang budget para rito. For them, ito lang ‘yong handa ko, tapos whatever extra money, siguro pang-regalo na or whatever. (Not everybody wants to celebrate ostentatiously or excessively. Others only have a set budget for this. For them, they only have this amount allocated for food, while the rest goes to gifts or whatever.)"

"Beauty and ugliness disappear equally under the wrinkles of age: one is lost in them, the other hidden."

"A child becomes for his parents, according to the education he receives, a blessing or a chastisement."

"There are times when we really choose the partner who is not right for us. We are exposed to guys who may be popular and good-looking. But somehow, the right one will also come."

"I was blindfolded when they took me out of the cell. They took me to the gallows. I heard a woman ask, "Do I let her fall?" Then I heard a broken voice answer her, "Yes, let her fall. But she's young, make sure her neck breaks right away so she doesn't suffer too much"... I waited for hours for them to lower the lever and put me out of my misery... until I heard that voice again, Take her down, she needs to be married first before we cast her into hell.. They thought an executed virgin would go straight to heaven and they didn't want to do me that honor."

"Daddy, where are you. Mommy won't wake up. Please, hurry. Mommy's dying. Daddy, hurry. Daddy. Daddy, why aren't you saying anything? Mommy's dying. Daddy. Please, say something."

"Fine, I'll help you reach that goal. I'll make you a martyr right now."

"Vahid Mobasseri - Vahid"

"Mariam Afshari - Shiva"

"Ebrahim Azizi - Eghbal"

"Hadis Pakbaten - Goli/Golrokh"

"Majid Panahi - Ali"

"Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr - Hamid"

"Delnaz Najafi - Eghbal's daughter"

"Afssaneh Najmabadi - Eghbal's wife"

"Georges Hashemzadeh - Salar"

"A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again."

"The energies of the soul slumber in the vague reveries of hope."

"Very few people know what love is, and very few of those that do, tell of it."

"To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones."

"In love, if inconstancy gives some pleasure, constancy alone gives happiness."