Absolute Quotes - page 17
Among today's Italians, when treading upon Haile Selassie's memory, the sense of guilt and shame is such that they react by seeing only his positive traits: the merits of his past actions. His portrayals always brim with excessive deferance, unwarranted admiration and delusion. They go on and on about his priestly composure, his regal dignity, his great intelligence and his generosity towards former adversaries. They never explain who this sovereign, who we made into a victim, really was. They never dare tell us if he was something more, or less, than a victim. For example, that he was an old man hardened in principles which were centuries out of date; that he was the absolute ruler of a nation which has never heard the words rights and democracy, which lives in a near prehistoric fashion in the suburbs, opressed by hunger, disease, ignorance and the squallor of a feudal regime which even we did not experience during the darkest years of the Medieval period.
Oriana Fallaci
It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me... Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see', to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me; absolute freedom! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?
Yves Klein
There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.
George F. Kennan
What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat.. .. profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now. – My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world.
Giorgio de Chirico
As a military man who has given half a century of active Service, I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated. There are powerful voices around the world who still give evidence to the old Roman precept-if you desire peace, prepare for war. This is absolute nuclear nonsense.
Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
The Impressionists were the first [painters] to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value to be merely relative.. .In Paul Cezanne's letters I notice ideas like these: 'Objects must turn, recede, and live. I wish to make something lasting from impressionism, like the art in the museums'.. ..'For an impressionist, to paint after nature is not to paint the object, but to express sensations'.. ..'After having looked at the old masters, one must take haste to leave them and to verify in one's self the instincts, the sensations that dwell in us.'
Fernand Léger
The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles... If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.
Fernand Léger
..the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.
Fernand Léger
One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn't know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?... Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast.
Fernand Léger
The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.
Simone Weil
Of the radical and iconoclastic ideals preached in the early years of the revolution, all were discarded except those which helped the state to exert absolute control over the individual. Hence the idea of collective education and reduction of parental authority to the minimum continued to hold sway, but an end was put to "progressive” educational methods designed to promote initiative and independence. Strict discipline became once more the rule, and in this respect Soviet schools differed from Tsarist ones only in the immensely increased emphasis on indoctrination. In due course, puritanical sexual ethics were restored to favour. (pg. 53)
Leszek Kołakowski
For the government of the temporary magistrates of a democracy, or even the laws themselves may be as tyrannical as the maxims of the most despotic monarchy, and the administration of the government may be as destructive of private happiness. The only consolation that a democracy suggests in those circumstances is, that every member of the state has a chance of arriving at a share in the chief magistracy, and consequently of playing the tyrant in his turn; and as there is no government in the world so perfectly democratical, as that every member of the state, without exception, has a right of being admitted into the administration, great numbers will be in the same condition as if they had lived under the most absolute monarchy; and this is, in fact, almost universally the case with the poor, in all governments.
Joseph Priestley
Art' is a Renaissance invention which has been carried to a state of extreme refinement in the present day. This is the so-called 'abstract art'. The production of good works of art was achieved only at the cost of an enormous concentration upon certain matters. This concentration could be achieved only through neglecting 'life', through the very loss of life- just as religion had experienced before. 'Today this situation is no longer tolerable'. Today life is paramount. Modern life in general rejects all tendencies towards isolation and ivory tower-like exclusiveness. It is absolute un-modern to concentrate upon just one thing (as did the middle Ages!) Modern life is based upon the construction, which is to say, upon a system of tensions or the neutralization of the system of carry and support. In agreement with this concept we too must distribute our vitality over the whole range of life taken in the broadest possible sense. All other attitudes towards life produce tragedy.
Theo van Doesburg
We permit absolute possession of the soil of our country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil to the vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a degree, indicates that, as regards true social science, we are still in a state of barbarism.
Alfred Russel Wallace
What has been the state of things since 1853? It is useless to blink the fact that not merely within the circle of the public departments and of Cabinets, but throughout the country at large, and within the precincts of this House-the guardians of the purse of the people-the spirit of public economy has been relaxed; charges upon the public funds of every kind have been admitted from time to time upon slight examination; every man's petition and prayer for this or that expenditure has been conceded with a facility which I do not hesitate to say you have only to continue for some five or ten years longer in order to bring the finances of the country into a state of absolute confusion.
William Ewart Gladstone
