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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Less
Subject
Calculable
Individual
Elements
Statistically
Experience
Mass
Imitate
Another
Therefore
Attitudes
Men
Subjects
Teaches
Attitude
Element
Opinion
Opinions
Teach
Historical

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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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