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Quote by Emily Henry

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Beach Read

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Emily Henry

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“Unconditional praise of life and happiness. Existenz uber alles! This fierce optimism, this idealism, which sees the worst catastrophes, the worst corruption as having a right to claim mitigating circumstances. The critical spirit is not dead, contrary to the opinion of the Enlightenment nostalgics. It has simply metabolized into all the ironic procedures, all the sardonic artifices in which we play, smugly, on our own incredulity. 'The Last Man, talking to himself while shaking his head incredulously,' said Nietzsche. Excess today, our contemporary 'hubris', is the excess of universal hybridization - like the fluorescent rabbit that is a cross between a rabbit and an octopus - and of making everything copulate with itself like the crepidula fornicata.”

OptimismCritical ThinkingEduardo Kac
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Being secondarily pessimistic - believing that the good always ends up going bad. And secondarily optimistic - believing that the system is best placed to put an end to itself. After the three great revolutions - Galileo and the end of geocentrism, Darwin and the theory of evolution, Freud and the 'discovery' of the Unconscious - our contemporary revolution is that of the virtual and of information technology, and it distances man increasingly from sovereignty over the natural world, of which he was the centre in the days when the earth did not yet revolve around the sun, in the days when he was not yet descended from the apes. He is becoming increasingly eccentric today - a peripheral, artificial extension of his own model.”

OptimismPessimismVirtual Revolution
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“It used to be the Right that was pessimistic while the Left was unfailingly optimistic. Today on the Right it's 'sunrise' neoliberalism and, on the Left, the Tristes Tropiques. If it is Italian terrorism's ambition to destabilize the state, then it is absurd: the state is already so nonexistent that it would be a joke to try and kill it off any more. Or else it is fuelled by the perverse desire to do too much which might lead to law and order and the state becoming more stable, or at least being perpetually reestablished, fragile as they are. Perhaps that is the terrorists' dream. They long for an immortal enemy. Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not, that proves the State doesn't exist.”

OptimismTerrorismPessimismStatePolitical SpectrumLevi Strauss
Book:Cool memories
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