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The Supreme Trick Of Mass Insanity Is That It Persuades You That The Only Abnormal Person Is The One Who Refuses To Join In The Madness Of Others, The One Who Tries Vainly To Resist. We Will Never Understand Totalitarianism If We Do Not Understand That People Rarely Have The Strength To Be Uncommon.

-Eugene Ionesco

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The Supreme Trick Of

Eugene Ionesco

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The Supreme Trick Of Mass Insanity Is That It Persuades You That The Only Abnormal Person Is The One Who Refuses To Join In The Madness Of Others, The One Who Tries Vainly To Resist. We Will Never Understand Totalitarianism If We Do Not Understand That People Rarely Have The Strength To Be Uncommon.

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A Really Conscientious Doctor Ought To Die With His Patient. The Captain Goes Down With His Ship.

I Believe That In The History Of Art And Of Thought There Has Always Been At Every Living Moment Of Culture A Will To Renewal. This Is Not The Prerogative Of The Last Decade Only. All History Is Nothing But A Succession Of Crises - Of Rupture, Repudiation And Resistance. When There Is No Crisis, There Is Stagnation, Petrifaction And Death. All Thought, All Art Is Aggressive.

Childhood Is Over The Moment Things Are No Longer Astonishing.

No Society Has Been Able To Abolish Human Sadness, No Political System Can Deliver Us From The Pain Of Living, From Our Fear Of Death, Our Thirst For The Absolute. It Is The Human Condition That Directs The Social Condition, Not Vice Versa.

Oh Words, What Crimes Are Committed In Your Name? ~jack Or The Submission

You Can Only Predict Things After They Have Happened.

Only The Ephemeral Is Of Lasting Value.

Every Work Of Art (unless It Is A Psuedo-intellectualist Work, A Work Already Comprised In Some Ideology That It Merely Illustrates, As With Brecht) Is Outside Ideology, Is Not Reducible To Ideology. Ideology Circumscribes Without Penetrating It. The Absence Of Ideology In A Work Does Not Mean An Absence Of Ideas; On The Contrary It Fertilizes Them.

Daisy: I Never Knew You Were Such A Realist-i Thought You Were More Poetic. Where's Your Imagination? There Are Many Sides To Reality. Choose The One That's Best For You. Escape Into The World Of Imagination.

As Soon As One Knows One Is Going To Die, Childhood Is Over.... So One Can Be Grown Up At Seven. Then, I Believe Most Human Beings Forget What They Have Understood, Recover Another Sort Of Childhood That Can Last All Their Lives. It Is Not A True Childhood But A Kind Of Forgetting. Desires And Anxieties Are There, Preventing You From Having Access To The Essential Truth.

Banality Is A Symptom Of Non-communication. Men Hide Behind Their Cliches.

Mediocrity Is More Dangerous In A Critic Than In A Writer.

A Writer Never Has A Vacation. For A Writer, Life Consists Of Either Writing Or Thinking About Writing.

God Is Dead. Marx Is Dead. And I Don't Feel So Well Myself.

The Arts Are Man's Most Useless ... And Essential ... Activity.

There Are More Dead People Than Living. And Their Numbers Are Increasing. The Living Are Getting Rarer.

We Haven't The Time To Take Out Time.

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I've Always Been Suspicious Of Collective Truths.

Explanation Separates Us From Astonishment, Which Is The Only Gateway To The Incomprehensible.

The Supreme Trick Of Mass Insanity Is That It Persuades You That The Only Abnormal Person Is The One Who Refuses To Join In The Madness Of Others, The One Who Tries Vainly To Resist. We Will Never Understand Totalitarianism If We Do Not Understand That People Rarely Have The Strength To Be Uncommon.

People Who Don't Read Are Brutes. It Is Better To Write Than To Make War, Isn't It?

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Everything That Has Been Will Be, Everything That Will Be Is, Everything That Will Be Has Been.

Oh Righteous Doom, That They Who Make Pleasure Their Only End, Ordering The Whole Life For Its Sake, Miss That Whereto They Tend. While They Who Bid Stern Duty Lead, Content To Follow, They, Of Duty Only Taking Heed, Find Pleasure By The Way.

The End Of Childhood Is When Things Cease To Astonish Us. When The World Seems Familiar, When One Has Got Used To Existence, One Has Become An Adult.

Describe A Circle, Stroke Its Back And It Turns Vicious.

I Started Writing For The Theatre Because I Hated It.

Shakespeare Was The Great One Before Us. His Place Was Between God And Despair.

We Are All Looking For Something Of Extraordinary Importance Whose Nature We Have Forgotten; I Am Writing The Memoirs Of A Man Who Has Lost His Memory.

Good Men Make Good Rhinoceroses, Unfortunately.

I Am Told, In A Dream You Can Only Get The Answer To All Your Questions Through A Dream. So In My Dream, I Fall Asleep, And I Dream, In My Dream, That I'm Having That Absolute, Revealing Dream.

Childhood Is The World Of Miracle And Wonder; As If Creation Rose, Bathed In The Light, Out Of The Darkness, Utterly New And Fresh And Astonishing. The End Of Childhood Is When Things Cease To Astonish Us.

Beauty Is A Precious Trace That Eternity Causes To Appear To Us And That It Takes Away From Us. A Manifestation Of Eternity, And A Sign Of Death As Well.

When I Was Born, I Was Almost Fourteen Years Old. That's Why I Was Able To Understand More Easily Than Most What It Was All About.

I Have No Other Pictures Of The World Apart From Those Which Express Evanescence, And Callousness, Vanity And Anger, Emptiness, Orhideous Useless Hate. Everything Has Merely Confirmed What I Had Seen And Understood In My Childhood: Futile And Sordid Fits Of Rage, Cries Suddenly Blanketed By The Silence, Shadows Swallowed Up For Ever By The Night.

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I Have Always Considered Imaginative Truth To Be More Profound, More Loaded With Significance, Than Every Day Reality... Everything We Dream About, And By That I Mean Everything We Desire, Is True (the Myth Of Icarus Came Before Aviation, And If Ader Or Bleriot Started Flying It Is Because All Men Have Dreamed Of Flight). There Is Nothing Truer Than Myth... Reality Does Not Have To Be: It Is Simply What Is.

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Illusions Of Grandeur

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I Am Not Capitulating.

Why Was I Born, If It Wasn't Forever?

It Isn't What People Think That Is Important, But The Reason They Think What They Think.

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