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Quote by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

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La forma de las ruinas

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez

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“He shook his head. "No. I don't like that word. Good is always used to put others down. Look at Earth. You have your 'good Christians' who hate gays, who formed bigoted groups to get rid of other good people. You have your 'good people' who sneer at the ones who work two jobs because one has wealth and the other doesn't. The ones who call themselves good? They're the ones looking for a reason to put others down.”

Good And EvilHipocrisy
Book:The Lure of the Devil
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“[...]No society can live without in a sense opposing its own value system: it has to have such a system, yet it must at the same time define itself in contradistinction to it. At present we live according to at least two principles: that of sexual liberation and that of communication and information. And everything suggests that the species itself, via the threat of AIDS, is generating an antidote to its principle of sexual liberation; that by means of cancer, which is a breakdown of the genetic code, it is setting up a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control; and that the viral onslaught in general signals its sabotaging of the universal principle of communication. What if all this betokened a refusal of the obligatory flows of sperm, sex and words, a refusal of forced communication, programmed information and sexual promiscuity? What if it heralded a vital resistance to the spread of flows, circuits and networks - at the cost, it is true, of a new and lethal pathology, but one, nevertheless, that would protect us from something even worse? If so, then AIDS and cancer would be the price we are paying for our own system: an attempt to cure its banal virulence by recourse to a fatal form. Nobody can predict the effectiveness of such an exorcism, but the question has to be asked: What is cancer a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from? (Could it be the total hegemony of genetic coding?) What is AIDS a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from? (Could it be a sexual epidemic, a sort of total promiscuity?) The same goes for drugs: all melodramatics aside, what exactly do they protect us from, from what even worse scourge do they offer us an avenue of escape? (Could it be the brutalizing effects of rationality, normative socialization and universal conditioning?) As for terrorism, does not its secondary, reactive violence shield us from an epidemic of consensus, from an ever-increasing political leukaemia and degeneration and from the imperceptible transparency of the State? All things are ambiguous and reversible. After all, it is neurosis that offers human beings their most effective protection against madness. AIDS may thus be seen not as a divine punishment, but as quite the opposite - as a defensive abreaction on the part of the species against the danger of a total promiscuity, a total loss of identity through the proliferation and speed-up of networks.”

CynicismAmbiguityHipocrisyReversibility
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Todavía me pregunto que impulsos se consideran normales y cuáles anormales ¿Será que hay un hambre normal y otra anormal, una sed normal y otra anormal? ¿Acaso el hambre no es siempre hambre y la sed, sed? ¡Cuánta hipocresía y falta de logística subyacen a una diferenciación semejante!”

Social IssuesHomophobiaHipocrisy
Book:The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps
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