"It is human life you value isn't it? Not its worth. Just human life. As if it were gold and could be neither good nor bad nor worth more nor worth less but must always be worth the same no matter what. One human life is one human life to you. You are absurd! Like your democracy, which you imagine you got from the Greeks, who had slaves. One vote for each person. What a stupid idea! The worst in your eyes possess the same value as the best. You have no way of differentiating between them."

Alex Miller (writer)Literature See all quotes by Alex Miller (writer) →

React to this quote

More by Alex Miller (writer)

“I have discovered motives, my own and everyone else's, to be impenetrable.”

“'The merging of different motif areas in her drawings and the transformation of spacial relationships into flat correspondences gathers towards a distortion of depicted reality and the dissolution of its phenomenal form.' I didn't try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could 'see' with his intellect.”

Resonant Thoughts

"For the present let us consider the position of the adepts as they now exist, or, to use the designation more generally employed in India, of "the Mahatmas." They constitute a Brotherhood, or Secret A…"

— A. P. Sinnett

#knowledge

"Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?" With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have "that fellow", because the pri…"

— Yasunari Kawabata

Literature1899–1972

#mind

"For 150 years, workers have struck over safety and health in myriad industries, most memorably in the twentieth century the miners’ strike over black lung. But we have not seen anything exactly like t…"

— Dan La Botz

History1945

#politics