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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

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
Memories
Books
History
Culture
Erase
Firsts
Destroy
Book
Memory
First
Step
People
Steps

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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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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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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How goodness heightens beauty!
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera