Vagrant Quotes
Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.
Simone Weil
To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.
Simone Weil
Ghyl laughed also. "If I'm too serious, you're too irresponsible.”
"Bah,” retorted Floriel. "Is the world responsible? Of course not! The world is random, vagrant, heedless. To be responsible is to be out of phase, to be insane!”
Ghyl pondered a moment. "This is perhaps the case, in a world left to itself. But society imposes order. Living in a society, it is not insane to be responsible.”.
Jack Vance
This, then, is the gain of the Good Fight in this war, first, that the nation has attained a living consciousness of its inevitable unity, second, that it has proved its enormous power, and third, that in the terrible struggle it has used that united power for, and not against, equal rights. And the spirit of caste which it has disabled it will now utterly destroy. For the Good Fight is not a crusade against a section or a State, but against caste everywhere in the country. This is now entrenched in the bitter prejudice against the colored race, which is as inhuman and unmanly as the old hatred and contempt of Christendom for the Jews. Lifting their heads from bloody defeat in the field, the wan and wasted States of the South say in terms caste must be maintained, and by every kind of vagrant law and hostile legislation they will try to maintain it.
George William Curtis
Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ. No doubt there was a strong case for it. Jesus was from the point of view of the High Priest a heretic and an impostor. From the point of view of the merchants he was a rioter and a Communist. From the Roman Imperialist point of view he was a traitor. From the commonsense point of view he was a dangerous madman. From the snobbish point of view, always a very influential one, he was a penniless vagrant.
George Bernard Shaw
