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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
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Books
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Erase
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People
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Memories
More quotes by Milan Kundera
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
Milan Kundera
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Milan Kundera
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
Milan Kundera
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Milan Kundera
Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
Milan Kundera
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Milan Kundera
Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
Milan Kundera
...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Milan Kundera
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
Milan Kundera
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Milan Kundera
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
