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To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

Joseph Conrad

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Joseph Conrad
Age: 66 †
Born: 1857
Born: December 3
Died: 1924
Died: August 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Berdichev
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
Power
Must
Great
Autocrat
Barbarian
Barbarians

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The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
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For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.
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Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
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I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
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The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
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It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.
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To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
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Youth is insolent it is its right - its necessity it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.
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Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
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A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
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I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
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The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
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Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy
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Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
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You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
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You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
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The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.
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It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
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Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
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Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
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