Nihilist Quotes - Page 2

• You go to jail for drinking beer and then walking with your bike. You go to jail for smoking a joint. For abortion. This is a nihilist policy which hurts people.

  Janusz Palikot

  Hurt, Drinking, Beer

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• I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.

  Ray Brassier

  Believe, Stills, I Still Believe

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• The Buddha is your real body, your original mind. This mind has no form or characteristics, no cause or effect, no tendons or bones. It's like space. You can't hold it. It's not the mind of materialists or nihilists. If you don't see your own miraculously aware nature, you'll never find a Buddha, even if you break your body into atoms.

  Bodhidharma

  Wisdom, Real, Space

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.43, Macmillan

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• Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death.

  Unknown

  Crush, Nihilism, Spirit

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• You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of.

  Tony Kushner

  Thinking, Giving, Guilty

  Interview with Andrea Bernstein, www.motherjones.com. July/August 1995.

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• People always thought if no one believed in God and we were nihilists then people would go around murdering each other. That didn't happen at all, we just bought a lot of things with credit.

  Noah Cicero

  People, Credit, Happens

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• I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Squares, Political

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

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• I am religious by nature, I'm not a nihilist. I don't follow, I don't even know what the tenets of things like deconstructionism are, and all those schools that come up and their way of looking at things that people strive to incorporate into what they write. I don't even know what they are. Because I sense from a distance that I don't want to know. And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility. Which is nihilistic, and ironic, detached, cool, and cowardly.

  Mark Helprin

  Religious, Distance, Writing

  Source: americasfuture.org

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• Maybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.

  Momus

  Inspiration, Volunteer, Long

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• We had the city trying to demolish two of our exhibition spaces, which was at first pretty disturbing. But following the freak-out is the realization that an attachment to any kind of form is pointless. Forgive me if I seem like a complete nihilist, but if the demolition trucks show up and the buildings come down, then that just presents a new setting in which an artist can work. The real challenge is trying to conceal my delight in the process.

  Kirsha Kaechele

  Real, Artist, Forgive Me

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments - negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  Disappointment, Sadness, Past

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• NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Leadership, School, Deny

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.149, 谷月社

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