Anti Fascists

"All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?"

"Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood."

"Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of "robber of remorse" and that I place in myself all [the townspeople's] repentence?"

"But, if it will help ease your irritated souls, please know, dearly departed, that you have ruined our lives."

"It is for the sake of order that I seduced Clytemnestra, for the sake of order that I killed my king. I wanted for order to rule and that it rule through me. I have lived without desire, without love, without hope: I made order. Oh! terrible and divine passion!"

"Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave."

"I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted."

"He is dead, and my hatred has died with him."

"Jupiter: I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Aegisteus: Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little."

"Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel."

"Zeus (Jupiter): Agistheus, you are a king, and it's to your sense of king-ship I appeal, for you enjoy wielding the scepter. Aegistheus: Continue. Zeus: You may hate me, but we are akin; I made you in my image. A king is a god on earth, glorious and terrifying as a god. Aegistheus: You, terrifying? Zeus: Look at me. [A long silence.] I told you you were made in my image. Each keeps order; you in Argos, I in heaven and on earth — and you and I harbor the same dark secret in our hearts. Aegistheus: I have no secret. Zeus: You have. The same as mine. The bane of gods and kings. The bitterness of knowing men are free. Yes, Aegistheus they are free. But your subjects do not know it, and you do."

"Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men — and to them alone — to let him flee or to destroy him."

"Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way."

"Jupiter: I gave you the liberty to serve me. Orestes: That is possible, but it has turned against you and there is nothing either one of us can do about it."

"I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead."

"Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile."

"We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load."

"Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men."

"Jupiter: I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you? Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free."

"I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path."

"You are a tiny little girl, Electra. Other little girls dreamed of being the richest or the most beautiful women of all. And you, fascinated by the horrid destiny of your people, you wished to become the most pained and the most criminal ... At your age, children still play with dolls and they play hopscotch. You, poor child, without toys or playmates, you played murder, because it is a game that one can play alone."

"In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself."

"Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."

"With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all."

"...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."

"I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough."

"Criminals together. We're in hell, my little friend, and there's never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing."

"If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves "absent", that is more proper."

"Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres."

"Your crystal? That's silly. Whom do you think you are fooling? Come on, everyone knows that I threw the baby out of the window. The crystal is shattered on earth, and I do not care. I am no longer anything but a skin, and my skin does not belong to you."

"It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell."

"As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished."

"You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do."

"Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist."

"Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts."

"On meurt toujours trop tôt - ou trop tard. Et cependant la vie est là, terminée : le trait est tiré, il faut faire la somme. Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie."

"We are in hell and I will have my turn!"

"If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser."

"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."

"He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life."

"What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"

"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."

"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them."

"Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind."

"To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all."

"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."

"We are dealing here with a kind of worker aristocracy; around them would gravitate the people who were to be helped and raised up but who, for the moment, really were inferiors within the context of the working class itself. This translated into the choice of a particular form of unionization. When the time came to raise the issue of forming industrial unions, the skilled workers opted for craft-based organization, because that would exclude the unskilled. Objectively, this gave rise to a particular kind of union struggle that was real enough at the time, because in practice it was enough for the skilled workforce in a factory—the minority—to go on strike for operations to cease, even if the unskilled majority wanted to go on working. The union practice of the time, the kind of self-valuing, the type of struggle and form of organization, corresponded strictly to what those workers were, to what the machine was. We are not saying here that they were wrong or right: they were all that the universal lathe allowed them to be. It was in them, as their superiority; they interiorized it, and this interiorization, or subjectivation, produced the whole phenomenon of anarcho-syndicalism. This was not, as Lukács claims, because they did not grasp the totality of what the working class was and what its struggle was. On the contrary, because they were at the centre of production, they did grasp it as it was at that time. It is true that at that time they were far better qualified than the rest, but it is also true that this led to the development of yellow unions, an aristocracy of labour and a host of fairly aberrant secondary elements reflecting that conception, that interiorization in the form of social superiority, which disappeared wherever work that required training was replaced by semi-automated, then automated machines. But in that epoch they could not have been expected to foresee the existence of such machines, practically and in their struggle. Of course Marx described them in Capital, but he was a theorist, a leader of the International, not a worker who struggles at every instance of his life, someone who is formed by the machine and at the same time internally transforms it. Which means that class consciousness itself has its limits, which are the limits of the situation as long as that situation has not been completely revealed. Should this lead us to describe this type of 'class consciousness' as empty? Should we decide that the anarcho-syndicalists were not the men required? On the contrary, it is because they were aware of their strength, their courage and their worth, because they established unions and specific forms of struggle, that other forms of struggle could emerge in the era when specialized workers appeared. In the course of struggle, the subjective moment, as a way of being inside the objective moment, is absolutely indispensable to the dialectical development of social life and the historical process."

"A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words."

"What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal.... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space."

"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist."