The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Lawrence Stern (1759, ish)

Sometimes you have to wonder if it was a mistake for Super Metroid to be the greatest video game of all time.

“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory . . . Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .”

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

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Dereliction vs synthesis

“One important reason for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the CPSU is the complete denial of the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of the CPSU, the denial of Lenin and other leading personalities, and historical nihilism confused the people’s thoughts.”

“the development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

“Some of Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. … The pattern gathers in his soul, and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before.”

“The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even the sort the Germans have engineered … it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but complexity.”