Thursday, August 11, 2005
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In some cultures military defeat is worse than death; in others it is moral victory.
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The only time some Armenians think they are discharging their patriotic duty is when they are at each other’s throat.
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There is a type of tourist who goes to Florence for the pizza.
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I have observed that anonymous critics tend to be more aggressive.
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Success is as difficult to handle as failure.
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I analyze myself to understand others; and I analyze others to understand myself.
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An honest man is a charlatan’s worst nightmare.
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To how many of my fellow Armenians I could say:
Recover your humanity, you have nothing to lose but your Ottomanism.
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It’s not easy dealing with Armenians, but it helps if you are deaf to their insults and blind to their defects.
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Friday, August 12, 2005
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An in-depth study of contemporary Armenian literature in the Diaspora would be the shortest book in the world and it would say: Armenians in the Diaspora spend more money on pilaf and shish kebab than on books.
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Authoritarian environments offer no incentive for growth because questioning and doubting dogmatic assertions are not allowed.
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Take away Turks and the ego of some of our self-assessed, self-appointed, and self-satisfied pundits will collapse like a perforated balloon.
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Like Armenians, Turks too come in all sizes and shapes and some Turks have been so thoroughly brainwashed that only the ghost of Ataturk can reach them.
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A dogmatist is one who has been conditioned never to disagree with himself.
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Unlike fools, the smart know their limitations.
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The surest index of the future is not the promises of politicians or the rhetoric of charlatans but reality as assessed by objective historians.
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Dealing with filth is an inevitable part of life and it makes no difference what you do for a living. Understand this and many incomprehensible things about the human condition became less unbearable.
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Saturday, August 13, 2005
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Like most Armenians I was raised with a forest of prejudices. Which is why I am not surprised when teenage readers hurl insults at me as if I were a pro-Turkish traitor.
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Armenians of the Diaspora like to say that it will take two or even three generations for Armenians in the Homeland to be thoroughly de-Sovietized as if they themselves were in no need of being de-Ottomanized.
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We divide foreign historians into Armenophiles and Turcophiles. We don’t have a category for objective historians because we assume Armenophiles to be more objective than Turcophiles. No doubt Turks make a similar assumption about Turcophiles.
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A Turkish reader writes: “We will never apologize!” Thus implying that even if they do they will not mean it. Which amounts to saying that they will never accept the so-called values of the so-called civilized West, which has been the source of more evil than all the other continents combined. The irony here is that Armenians and Turks agree on viewing the West as thoroughly corrupt and hypocritical.
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The German government may have apologized to the Jews but many Germans as well as anti-Semites of all nations and tribes, including, alas, Armenians, think the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax.
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