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Quote by Clifford Cohen

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Clifford Cohen

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“One thing that you can be sure of in this world, is that nobody's responsible. The starving millions? That's someone else's fault - let them eat cake! The H-bomb? They're blown to smithereens? - God must have dropped it! The chocolate vending machine's out of order? It doesn't belong to the publican or his wife, certainly not! Nobody is who it belongs to, and nobody deals with official complaints! It restocks itself, of its own accord, totally self-perpetuating! But somebody's pocketing the non-returnable two bob bits ; if you want to know their names you can go to the devil!”

“Let’s watch out for the unpredictability and the wildcat jumps of contrarian people, whose sole interests are soaring targets at high-speed, at all costs and without any consideration. Perceptive understanding may help us discover the hidden actualities behind the ‘appearances’. .("Mama. Meine Bäume wachsen bis in den Himmel")”

“One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.”

“I have long been moved by Rosa Luxemburg's assertion that 'freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise,' and thus I've been attracted to contrarians, to people whose instinct is to go against the grain of officially accredited views - especially those accredited within their own circle of progressive thinkers. This has its dangers, to be sure.”