Fool Me Once
From today's CNN war coverage:
The residents of Basra, an important center of Iraq's Shiite population and Iraq's second-largest city, staged an uprising after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. But without backup from coalition forces that had driven Saddam Hussein's regime out of Kuwait, hundreds of thousands were killed.
The New Gods: An E.M. Cioran Sampler
Since things continue to get worse from generation to generation, to predict catastrophes is a normal activity, a duty of the mind....In history, we are always on the threshold of the worse....That is what makes history interesting, what makes us hate it, and be unable to detach ourselves from it.
We may be sure that the twenty-first century, more advanced than ours, will regard Hitler and Stalin as choirboys.
There is no point in being a monster if you are not also a theoretician of the monstrous.
Man, that exterminator, has designs on everything that lives, everything that moves: soon we shall be talking about the last louse.
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
Cow's urine was the only medicine monks were authorized to use in the first Buddhist communities. One cannot imagine a more judicious restriction. If we pursue peace, we shall reach it only by rejecting whatever is a factor in disturbance, whatever man has grafted onto simplicity, onto his original health. Nothing exposes our failure better than the spectacle of a pharmacy: all the remedies desirable for each of our ills, but none for our essential ill, for the disease of which no human invention can cure us.
Disgusted by nations, I turn to Mongolia, where it must be good to live, where there are more horses than men, where the Yahoo has not yet triumphed.
--E.M. Cioran, The New Gods. 1969.
5:10:42 PM 
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