Great Quotes III: Source and Context are Key

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^He’s wrong. They succeeded. He should read the OED entry more carefully. The four quotations used to illustrate the meaning of the word mention the following very diverse comedic strains from the show:

Pythonesque vox pop monologues
Pythonesque funny walks
Pythonesque non sequiturs
Pythonesque obscure funny cheeses

“Pythonesque” is a word, yes, but it would seem to mean precisely the "can't say what kind of humor it was" humor that it was, and that Jones would have liked it to be remembered as.
 
Ah, yes. But in that they also failed just as much as succeeded.

Their aim was to come up with an unclassifiable type of humour. And such humour is now classifiable.

I don't blame them though. I think they were doomed to fail. Especially if they succeeded.
 
"Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell."

— Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race)", 1914
 
Wilhelm Liebknecht recalling a pub crawl with Karl Marx and Edgar Bauer in London:

One evening, Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy […], had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of “making a beer trip.” The problem was to “take something” in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road – making the something a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum, considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city. But we went to work undaunted and managed to reach the end of Tottenham Court Road without accident.

There loud singing issued from a public house; we entered and learned that a club of Odd Fellows were celebrating a festival. We met some of the men belonging to the “party,” and they at once invited us “foreigners” with truly English hospitality to go with them into one of the rooms. We followed them in the best of spirits, and the conversation naturally turned to politics – we had been easily recognised as Germany fugitives; and the Englishmen, good old-fashioned people, who wanted to amuse us a little, considered it their duty to revile thoroughly the German princes and the Russian nobles. By “Russian” they meant Prussian nobles. Russia and Prussia are frequently confounded in England, and not alone of account of their similarity of name. For a while, everything went smoothly. We had to drink many healths and to bring out and listen to many a toast.

Then the unexpected suddenly happened…

Edgar Bauer, hurt by some chance remark, turned the tables and ridiculed the English snobs. Marx launched an enthusiastic eulogy on German science and music – no other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of music as Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the miserable political and economic conditions from accomplishing any great practical work, but who would yet outclass all other nations. So fluently I have never heard him speak English.

For my part, I demonstrated in drastic words that the political conditions in England were not a bit better than in Germany [… ] the only difference being that we Germans knew our public affairs were miserable, while the Englishmen did not know it, whence it were apparent that we surpassed the Englishmen in political intelligence.

The brows of our hosts began to cloud […]; and when Edgar Bauer brought up still heavier guns and began to allude to the English cant, then a low “damned foreigners!” issued from the company, soon followed by louder repetitions. Threatening words were spoken, the brains began to be heated, fists were brandished in the air and – we were sensible enough to choose the better part of valor and managed to effect, not wholly without difficulty, a passably dignified retreat.

Now we had enough of our “beer trip” for the time being, and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over some paving stones. “Hurrah, an idea!” And in memory of mad student pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious – Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps – it was, perhaps, 2 o’clock in the morning and the streets were deserted in consequence. But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately countersignals were given. The position became critical.

Happily we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed an activity that I should not have attributed to him. And after the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there running through an alley – a back yard between two streets – whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe. They did not have our description and we arrived at our homes without further adventures.
 
"The notion of doing without the state or government, in a more positive sense, can be taken in two sense. Either it can imply a harmless, antiquated, but unworkable utopianism, something to be grown out of, or it can betoken a contemporary, workable alternative to the state. The capacity to live in such a stateless society stands in precise ratio to personal and political maturity."
-Andrew Vincent, note 1, Chapter 5: Anarchism, Modern Political Ideologies (3rd edition)

"Although [certain feminists] support postmodernism's practice of universalizing suspicion, they don't seem to regard their cause as suspect. They know their credentials to be intact"
-Kariel H.S, 1990, "The Feminist Subject Spinning in the Postmodern Project", Political Theory, 18, 2.
 
"You have detailed a number of horrible actions in the history of the U.S. But here's the difference, we talk about them. There are many books and articles that discuss the atrocities to the Native Americans, we have books and major motion pictures about slavery. We even have granite memorials for these things so that we can never forget what our ancestors did and so we can learn and never do them again.

We can, as reasonable people, debate the necessity of the obliteration of German and Japanese cities (remember, there were no laser guided missiles back then and the wars were not over), but no one denies that these things happened!

The Japanese leadership and many Japanese are denying what happened, and they don't allow debate as we can see in this article.

We were and are far from perfect, but we allow sunlight to shine on our problems. Hopefully you recognize the difference."
-Steve, comment on "Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper", New York Times
 
Isn't the U.S. rewriting certain school textbooks to take out parts of history that certain people "disagree" with? It was a conservative initiative and from what I remember it was going forward.

Whatever happened with that?
 
"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness, but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all, what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness, hypocrisy, falsehood.... Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets, there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery; one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation.... And such a state of things is obviously what we want; apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him—illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind—and everything is all right.'

-Anthony Chekhov, Gooseberry
 
I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

Fidel Castro

Me, neither.
 
That our soul's salvation is through the worship of Fidel as God?
 
Then all those close shaves would have actually accomplished something.
 
That actually happened. The CIA attempted to contaminate his clothes with thallium, which would make all his hair fall out, in the hope of embarrassing him and weakening the regime. (I think they were probably scraping the bottom of the plot-barrel, by this point.)
 
That our soul's salvation is through the worship of Fidel as God?
What? No, that you don't have to be an athiest to be a communist...



That actually happened. The CIA attempted to contaminate his clothes with thallium, which would make all his hair fall out, in the hope of embarrassing him and weakening the regime. (I think they were probably scraping the bottom of the plot-barrel, by this point.)
Read Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. There were far weirder plots.

And Fidel survived them all. As did Cuba; as did Socialism; as did Marxism-Leninism.

How long did the pre-Franco Spanish Republic last? Not 55 years! :mwaha:
 
No, closer to "If I made up things to improve my reputation, I'd be a world-class champion, right next to the likes of Stalin and Hitler."
 
No, closer to "If I made up things to improve my reputation, I'd be a world-class champion, right next to the likes of Stalin and Hitler."

The attempts are public record. He did not make them up.

Communism, ftw!
 
I don't think he was talking about the assassination attempts
 
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