Sunday, May 07, 2006
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As a boy my ambition was to be a writer, but my idea of a writer then was as different from what I do today as a virgin is from a bordello madam.
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I don’t mind admitting that I have been a source of disappointment to a great many people. But I have been a source of greater disappointment to myself.
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The slaughter of millions of innocent civilians is a serious matter that should not be forgotten. But it is equally wrong to make of it a collective obsession if only because our credibility is not enhanced if we project the image of monomaniacs.
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Choose yourself as god’s chosen and run the risk of being slaughtered by someone who decides to choose himself to be chosen by a superior god.
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“I know better” is an enemy of “I could be wrong.”
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The Internet is the quintessential democratic medium. It allows imbeciles and hooligans as much space as Nobel-Prize winners.
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Monday, May 08, 2006
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WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING
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We are a people like any other people, and most of our problems have been self-inflicted. Because I have been saying this I have become an outcast. Nothing new in that. All in a day’s work. Thus it was in the past and thus shall it be in the future.
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To those who object and say, “In what way was the Earthquake self-inflicted?” May I remind them of the maxim that is common knowledge among architects and contractors around the world: “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”
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And I remember, shortly after the Earthquake, when asked why the construction of buildings in Armenia, a well-know earthquake zone, was not closely supervised, a Moscow official with an Armenian last name stated on the evening TV news: “We don’t consider that our responsibility.”
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My mother is fond of quoting an Armenian saying that goes something like this: “Even if responsibility of blunders were made of very expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”
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Tuesday, May 09, 2006
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REVOLUTIONARIES
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Somewhere in Dostoevsky’s THE POSSESSED (sometimes also translated as THE DEVILS) a character says that when the revolution is fully achieved, “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, and Shakespeare will be stoned.”
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Like politicians everywhere, revolutionaries too speak with a forked tongue: what they say is not always what they mean, and it is not at all unusual for them to say the exact opposite of what they mean. So that when they speak of freedom, they may mean the freedom to kill, when they speak of equality, they may mean suppressing excellence, and when they speak of fraternity they may have fratricide in mind.
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If revolution were a religion, Cain and Torquemada would be two of its major role models and saints. In the eyes of some “useful idiots,” Stalin and Mao continue to be revolutionary saints.
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“Wrong words are hard to take back,” reads a headline in our paper today. So are wrong actions and policies, but they can be easily justified by revisionists, and there is a revisionist as well as a useful idiot in all of us.
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There is also a bourgeois. Like the revolutionary, the bourgeois may cling to ideas that have lost their validity, and both the bourgeois and the revolutionary may qualify as dupes or useful idiots of ideas that are eminently corruptible to the point of becoming their own contradictions.
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006
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ON THE RADIO
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People from all walks of life were being asked about their phobias. Some said death and dying, others old age and illness. An author said writer’s block. On the whole predictable stuff except for the woman who said: “I am fifty years old and I’m afraid I’ll never have sex again.”
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MY FAVORITE PUNCH LINE
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When an old Indian predicted a bad winter, they wanted to know how he could tell, and he replied: “White man makes big wood pile.”
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SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE
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Experience may teach us to avoid mistakes that we have made, but not all mistakes, of which there are an infinite number.
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