David Van Reybrouck · 656 pages
Rating: (3.4K votes)
“The fact that they did not ask for political power, however, did not mean that they were happy as ever. The native’s political apathy was more an indicator of a lack of education than of any surplus of satisfaction. In”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“But it was definitely a hecatomb, a slaughter on a staggering scale that was not intentional, but that could have been recognized much earlier as the collateral damage of a perfidious, rapacious policy of exploitation, a living sacrifice on the altar of the pathological pursuit of profit.”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“Early anthropology was not at all seen as art for art’s sake; it was intended to facilitate the colonizer’s work.”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“Scientists were the embodiment of this new-fangled sobriety—impartial, businesslike, colorless, and reliable. Or so people assumed. For in actual practice, it was their supposed impartiality that allowed them to gain so much influence. One”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“Mission schools were factories for tribal prejudice. Children who were not allowed to leave their villages were suddenly told that the Bakongo lived on the other side of their vast country and what they were to think of them.”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“came from the mines in Kivu.42 The area around the”
― David Van Reybrouck, quote from Congo: The Epic History of a People
“There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Slaughterhouse-five: The Children's Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death
“A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“I never wanted to fix things with them.” I pause, and my voice is very quiet. “I wanted out. I screwed up.”
“I don’t know, Murph.” We make the turn into the cemetery, and he hesitates, as if unsure of his next words. “I wonder if you’re just telling yourself that.”
I frown. “What?”
“I don’t think you wanted to kill yourself.”
I pull next to his car in the now-empty employee lot. “Didn’t you listen to everything I just told you?”
“Yeah. I did. Maybe you wanted to try to kill yourself, but I don’t think you wanted to actually do it.”
“What’s the difference?”
He opens the door and gets out, standing there, looking down at me. “You wore your seat belt.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Alkimist
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
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