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Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

 

Wallace Stevens

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I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are...

 

James Branch Cabell

 

This will be my picture, the one I shall leave behind.. ..But the centre? Where is the centre? I can’t find the centre.. ..Tell me, what shall I group it all around? Ah, Poussin's arabesque! He knew all about that. In the London ‘Bacchanal’, in the Louvre ‘Flora’ (both paintings of Poussin, Cézanne admired, fh), where does the line of the figures and the landscape begin, where does it finish.. ..It’s all one. There is no centre. Personally I would like something like a hole, a ray of light, an invisible sun to keep an eye on my figures, to bathe them, care them, intensify them.. ..in the middle (remark on one of his paintings ‘The Bathers’, fh)

 

Paul Cezanne

 

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

 

Barack Obama

 

Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence. My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent. Life is violent. Birth is a violent process. Tempests and earthquakes are violent movements of nature. My violence is the violence of life. It is not violence against nature, like the violence of the state, which sends your kids to the slaughterhouse, deadens your minds, and drives out your souls!

 

Klaus Kinski

 

Judy: Listen to me very carefully, sir. I don't want you to give me the Dumb Routine. Do you know what I'm talking about? If you're dumb, I'll know you're dumb. If you give me the dumb routine, I know it's a dumb routine.
Defendant: Yes, ma'am.
Judy: I know the difference, Mr. Carey. Do you understand that?
Defendant: [grinning] Yes, ma'am.
Judy: Okay, very good. Now we understand each other, sir. Believe me, by the time this is over you're not gonna be smiling.

 

Judith Sheindlin