I have forced myself to contradict myself [...] in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Making Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999) p. 296

What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs... If I had more money I would have to spend time taking care of it and that is not the way I want to live.

Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Making Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999) p. 157

The mediator between head and hands must be the heart

Fritz Lang / Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1926)

"Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalization. You have to be like Rodin, Michael Angelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 402

Originally published in 1921

"At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can"

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) pp. 161-162

Originally published in 1921

"When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but our knowledge?" she asked pathetically. "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren't we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing."
"You are merely making words," he said; "knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. you don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary – and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts – you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won't be conscious of what actually is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 45

Originally published in 1921

För övrigt avskyr jag samhället, ty det vilar ej på fritt fördrag, det är en vävnad av lögn - och jag flyr det med nöje!

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) p. 17
Originally published in 1879

Nu kan jag analysera den mycket omatalade konstnärsdriften, eftersom jag själv varit ute för den. Den vilar ytterst på en bred bas av frihetsbegär, frihet från nyttigt arbete; därför har också en tysk filosof definierat det sköna = det onyttiga; ty om ett konstverk vill vara nyttigt, röjer en avsikt eller tendens är det fult; vidare vilar driften på högmod; människan vill i konsten leka Gud, icke som om hon skulle kunna göra något nytt (det kan hon inte!), utan göra om, förbättra, arrangera. Hon börjar icke med att beundra förebilderna d.v.s. naturen, utan hon börjar med kritik. Man ser allt så bristfälligt och vill göra det bättre. Detta högmod som driver och denna frihet från syndafallets förbannelse, arbetet, gör att artisten känner sig stå över andra människor, vilket han på visst sätt gör, men han får också behov att ständigt påminnas härom, ty eljes kommer han lätt underfund med sig själv - det vill säga han finner intigheten i sin verksamhet och det oberättigade i sin flykt från det nyttiga. Detta ständiga behov av erkännande av sitt onyttiga arbete gör honom fåfäng, orolig, och ofta djupt olycklig - blir han sig själv klar, upphör ofta hans produktionsförmåga och han går under, ty att återvända i oket när han en gång smakat friheten, det kan endast den religiöse.

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) pp. 275-276
Originally published in 1879

Dans quelques années, quand je t'aurai oublié et que d'autres histoires comme celle-là, par la force encore de l'habitude, arriveront encore, je me souviendrai de toi comme de l'oubli de l'amour même. Je penserai à cette histoire comme à l'horreur de l'oubli ; je le sais déjà.

Marguerite Duras/Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959

Democracy is not a fixed political form of society, but rather [...] the deformation of society from itself through the act of material political manifestation. Democracy is a political process, the movement of democratization, which comes close to the idea of direct democracy [...]. On my view, democratization consists in the manifestation of dissensus, in demonstration as demos-stration, manifesting the presence of those who do not count. Democratization is politicization, it is the cultivation of what might be called politicities, zones of hegemonic struggle that work against the consensual idyll of the state. Such a disturbance of the state does not have to be teleologically linked to the construction of an archic nation-subject, but rather towards the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) pp. 129-130

Love is what gives consistency to an ethical subject, which allows it to persevere with a process of truth.
Love binds itself to justice on the basis of hope. The hope is that justice will be done and the subjective maxim is [...] Beckett's 'Continuez!' That is, continue in your conviction and love your neighbour as yourself. That is, we might define hope as political love.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44

Ethics cannot be based on any pre-given account of the subject, because the subject is not something that one is, but is rather something that one becomes. One can only speak of the subject in Badiou as a subject-in-becoming insofar as it shapes itself in relation to the demand apprehended in a situation.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44

Philosophical activity, by which I mean the free movement of thought and critical reflection, is defined by militant resistance of nihilism. That is, philosophy is defined by the thinking through of the fact that the basis of meaning has become meaningless.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 2

My work is real, not illusionary or conceptual. It is about real stones, real time, real actions.

Richard Long, Richard Long Selected Statements and Interviews (Haunch of Venison, 2007) p. 16

Argumentet "Kanske jag drömmer" är meningslöst därför att jag i så fall också drömmer detta yttrande, ja, t.o.m. detta att dessa ord betyder något.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Om Visshet (Thales: 1992) p. 57
Originally published in 1969