Breyten Breytenbach Quotations

The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests.

Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.

It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear.

Dangerous because your present Administration and its specialized agencies by all accounts know no restraint in hitting out at any perceived enemy of America, and nobody or nothing can protect one from their vindictiveness.

In dancing with the enemy one follows his steps even if counting under one's breath.

I think it's an area that one writes from that is curious because it is not a clearly defined partisan one.

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush represents the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your black and other compatriots must be just as anguished as we are.

Americans have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable.

I came, I saw, I was confused.

The world, our world, has existed since night of time, yet every day we must recreate it. If we did not walk upon the earth, it would not exist.

Even ivory towers need central heating.

Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach--if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.

I'm not saying that we are capable of that horror, but the knowledge of it is probably something that is very deeply part of all of us.