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Quote by Carlo Michelstaedter

“Just as a child cries out in the dark to make a sign of its own persona, which, in its infinite fear, it senses is insufficient, so men, who in the solitude of their empty spirit feel insufficient, inadequately affirm themselves, feigning the sign of the persona they do not have, “knowledge,” as if it were already in their hands. They no longer hear the voice of things telling them, “You are,” and amidst the obscurity they do not have the courage to endure, but each seeks his companion’s hand and says, “I am, you are, we are,” so that the other might act the mirror and tell him,“you are, I am, we are”; and together they repeat, “we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.” Thus do they stupefy one another.”

Quote by Carlo Michelstaedter

Work

Persuasion and Rhetoric

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Carlo Michelstaedter

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“This, which men often call docility, goodness, or even superiority or knowledge of the world,is none other than the superficiality of those without reason in what they do, who merely find themselves doing it, not knowing why they wanted the things they wanted,having neither the potency of those things in themselves nor the sufficiency to withstand their loss. Instead they find themselves extracting their little lives from those things.Only fear for their own continuation makes them exchange those things now, in the same way that they grasped them before,when they obeyed that fear through insufficiency.”

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“The challenge with hidden racism in the shape of discrimination is that although it exists in most countries and within humanity at large, it is not a normal state of being. Do you ever see young children and babies of various skin colours and cultures rejecting each other on the playground? If anything, they tend to get curious and come close to discover their differences, or they simply don’t notice any. If a child ever does discriminate or reject another child because of her or his colour or cultural origin, it is always due to a learned behaviour. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. We take it in, like air based on our environment. All types of racism are taught. None of us are born judging each other. Judgement is a taught behaviour.”