Outrage and the Unthinkable

Sunday, December 16, 2012 – Outrage and the Unthinkable

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash. Your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them. ~ William Faulkner

What you need is sustained outrage… there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority. ~ Molly Ivins

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it. ~ Karl Kraus

Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood – we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we. ~ Jean Rostand

One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage. ~ David Simon

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it. ~ G. K. Chesterton

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. ~ R. D. Laing

Well, when I was a kid, if my father was witnessing something that he thought was particularly outrageous or he was looking at some sort of a question that he thought lacked proper definition, he would say, Well, at least Jesse James had the honor to wear a mask. ~ Richard Neal

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought. ~ Samuel Butler

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. ~ Archibald MacLeish

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. ~ Salman Rushdie

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. ~ E. M. Forster

We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless. ~ J. William Fulbright

Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. ~ Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood. ~ William Allen White

Sooner barbarity than boredom. ~ Theophile Gautier

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance. ~ Pierre Schaeffer

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity. ~ Nelson DeMille

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances. ~ Simone Weil

Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~ Edmond de Goncourt

We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it’s all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It’s the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. ~ Bertolt Brecht

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. ~ Edward Bellamy

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. ~ John Buchan

First you destroy those who create values. Then you destroy those who know what the values are, and who also know that those destroyed before were in fact the creators of values. But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer judge or know that what he does is barbaric. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski