Post Apartheid Quotes

Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depression will hang us all in the end. Considering the life we live, the values we teach our children, what we believe in everything is a movement for change and every pause between words is a revolutionary act. The 'struggle' was like a painful mental illness. The liberation in retrospect was either the exit from our slavery ushering us into a novel, brave, bold and brilliant world or a mass hallucination. The political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has gone as far as corrupting liberty. ~ Abigail George

As George Orwell said, it is not easy to become sane. For South Africa, perhaps it will take as many lifetimes as we have tried to put between the present and the Dutch East India Company. There are many minds if you take a good look. Eventually in the same way the measure of loss and grief does, karma will catch up with all of us. Post-apartheid South Africa is not more enlightened than her sister apartheid South Africa. You may know nothing but tell me what you feel when you think, see, act, respond and sense. What corresponds with thought, sight, action, response and your intuition? (The warrior plunders on) racism is especially a majority shareholder at all levels. We forget that it is a privilege to live in a post-apartheid South Africa. ~ Abigail George

War and peace. There are blurred lines in the realities of both. A separation anxiety as the paradigm shifts from the air that a sniper wears on his face (real life, entertainment for the masses or the propaganda machine you decide), to the blueprint of an assassination in a driveway (Chris Hani lying in a pool of his own blood). You know that we cannot eat stones but we can burn, butcher, necklace, murder, forcibly remove and displace entire families, races of different faiths in the name of apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Chris Hani instruments of change, war, tolerance or peace. The Romantics got it right before anyone else did. Truth is beauty. The truth is South Africa is not cool anymore. ~ Abigail George

Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different. ~ Adhir Kalyan

When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the post-apartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality. ~ Ian McKellen

Where does South Africa find herself now in the post-apartheid dilemma? Is this country still a believer in the country of blood, milk and honey, does she seek perfection in the reports of minorities, the land of thirst, of afro and political activists who were active in 'the struggle' what happened to their children, their wives and their husbands? There are no longer straitjackets and cold showers in the lunatic asylum. Banging their heads against the walls. Banging, banging and banging away like an empty drum. Every generation wants to change the world. There must be unification of some kind. Students brought together by protest marches. ~ Abigail George

post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven asks that question, then it asks another: What would you then try ~ Anonymous

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again. ~ John Le Carre

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. ~ Umberto Eco

Positively, he [Heidegger] shows that the prospect of death doesn't of itself destroy all possibilities of meaning but calls instead for these to be relocated from fantasies about a future post-mortem life. However, I don't think he does enough in this work to show that this relocation has - I believe - a primarily ethical character (in Levinas's sense of 'ethical'). ~ George Pattison

We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country ... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. ~ Theodor Herzl

Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas. ~ Tom Robbins

We sat in silence, staring out into the street, listening to the creak of the porch swing, the crickets, and the occasional gunshot. ~ Will McIntosh

Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience. ~ Masha Tupitsyn

Yet the apparent strength of this 3-G jihad belies its very weakness. Every day, its supporters post online thousands of revealing messages and videos, giving away much more useful information about themselves than was known about Al Qaeda after 9/11. Their freedom of action has encouraged acts of extreme cruelty, which risks provoking a backlash (consider, for example, the Jordanian government's reaction to the execution of one of its pilots) and alienating potential recruits. ~ Anonymous

You're not gonna start writing 'Hardy loves Miracle' all over your notebooks, are you? Sing her a song and post it on YouTube? ~ M. Leighton

It may be the case that [post-Holocaust] the authentic Jewish
agnostic and the authentic Jewish believer are closer than at
any previous time. ~ Emil Fackenheim

I am also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberatorsthey fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five day work week! What's to be ashamed of? ~ Barbra Streisand

The (post) structuralist temper requires too great a depersonalization of the writing/speaking subject. Writing becomes plagiarism; speaking becomes quoting. Meanwhile, we do write, we do speak. ~ Ihab Hassan

Being a celebrity can be very intoxicating and very addicting. And I've always been afraid of that, because I've grown up post-almost every child star out there who has gone wayward. ~ Malcolm-Jamal Warner

Since it happens every month I don't think she'll die from blood loss. What's the mission?" Darian asked. "She needs tampons. Evidently it helps with this process. We have to secure the location of where they are being sold, acquire them and then get them back to my mate post haste." "You can rely on us Aiden. ~ Alanea Alder

Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa. ~ Edward Said

I start reading every Elizabeth Wurtzel essay with optimism, like maybe finally she put her talent to writing about something than herself, and by the end of paragraph three that optimism has fled. So maybe you know Wurtzel has written an essay for New York Magazine? Probably you know, because for whatever reason, Wurtzel provokes a deep need in people to talk about how much they hate Wurtzel. So the comments are hundreds deep, Twitter is ablaze, and here I am, writing this blog post.

And actually, she reminds me of Mary MacLane. She was a 19-year-old girl who wrote a memoir called I Await the Devil's Coming in 1901 and it was an instant success. I wrote the introduction to the upcoming reissue, and there I talk about what a deeply interesting book it was. Not only "for its time," but also it's just kind of visceral and nasty and snarling, yet elegantly written.

I kept thinking about MacLane, after the introduction got handed in and things went off to press. But this time, it wasn't her writing that interested me, it was the way she never wrote anything very interesting ever again. She got stunted, somehow, winning all of that acclaim for being a young, sour thing. And I wondered if it was the fame that stunted her, because she spent the rest of her career spitting out copies of the memoir that made her famous. And it worked, until it didn't. ~ Jenna Crispin

Where are the deputies?'
'On their way up to the first-aid post.'
'What happened to them?'
'I did. ~ Lee Child

I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below."
"Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down."
"A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second place, but why it refuses to come out in the first case."
"And why does it refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly.
"Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten."
"Excuse me," Belbo said to Agliè, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before.
You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West. ~ Umberto Eco

There's nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that the post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch. ~ Steve Toltz

The post-totalitarian malady has taken its most acute form in Romania. And it has taken place for very specific reasons. The repression here has been more cruel, more brutal, than in other states caught in the inferno of a 'socialist paradise.' ~ Octavian Paler

Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King Jr., can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream speech. No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this had a dream. We do not know what the dream was'. ~ Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate - the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time (for example, media stories monopolize attention for a week or so then are instantly forgotten); on the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty. It may be that Jameson's identification and analysis of this temporal antimony is his most important contribution to our understanding of postmodern/post-Fordist culture. ~ Mark Fisher

Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What's worse is that he is now running amok. ~ Salman Rushdie

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice - he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know.

If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it.

Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order - Esch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure. ~ Milan Kundera

The Divine Law was revealed to Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written in the Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations of post-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handed down orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and later still transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. ~ Maurice H. Harris

You must remember there is a set up from above at all times, someone is born for a purpose in this world and no one can changed. Moses was born to deliver his people from Egypt although he thought he was not good enough to do the job. David was born deliver his people from the giant called Goliath and Nelson Mandela was also born to deliver his nation from the apartheid regime. Our existence really matter in this world. ~ Euginia Herlihy

By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today. ~ John Horgan

The President's post should not be politicised. Once a president is elected, he is above politics. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

We won't have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don't know those people, we don't even know people who know those people, we're once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don't like and repost and then, and then it's like it didn't happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we're used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he's there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won't know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near. ~ Tommy Orange

After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become 'A Grand Day Out.' ~ Nick Park

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. ~ Jonathan Kozol

A FEATHER.
A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive. ~ Gertrude Stein

The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 'reforms,' even when they personally had nothing to do with the past crimes. ~ Anne Applebaum

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come. ~ George R R Martin

The search for a way to eradicate this scourge ... is left to incidental dabbling and uncoordinated research. - The Washington Post, 1946 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Un(der)known Writers: Flavia Dzodan By The New Inquiry Few words define The Netherlands better than "imperialist". In a time of white appropriations of post colonial theory, few pause to realize that no post colonial analysis is possible while we live in a country where the "post" lays within a distant future (i.e. The Netherlands still holds colonial territories in the Caribbean). ~ Anonymous

She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity -- just as every foreigner did, one way or another:
- Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger
- Cleft Stick (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation
- Rantipole (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.
In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote 'In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy. ~ Elif Shafak

There were times in my life when I had one thing to do all day, but I still couldn't get to it. I gotta go to the post office, but I'd probably have to put on pants. And they're only open till five. Looks like I'm going to have to do that next week. ~ Jim Gaffigan