Alderman Dana McLendon Quotes

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

Negation is the mind`s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher`s the poet`s equal there.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven`t been cut off.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Isn`t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

My mission is to kill time, and time`s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation`s paradise and it`s tomb.

I`m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Word - that invisible dagger.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.