Peter Weiss Quotes

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out.

The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.

What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling I'd like to know who they think they are fooling They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on

Don't be deceived when our Revolution has been finally stamped out and they tell you things are better now Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which these new industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you

Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out. Niether side is glorious. On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing - not to lie under theearth, but to walk upon it - without crutches.

We can say what we like without favour or fear and what we can't say we can breathe in your ear

What's the point of a revolution without general copulation copulation copulation

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

Fight on land and sea All men want to be free If they don't never mind we'll abolish all mankind

We've got rights the right to starve We've got jobs waiting for work We're all brothers lousy and dirty We're all free and equal to die like dogs

Something unfathomable lies behind every thought ... something for which there aren't any words.

The only truths we can point to are the ever-changing truths of our own experience.

Nature supplies the game of chess with its implements; science with its system; art with its aesthetic arrangement of its problems; and God endows it with its blessed power of making people happy.

Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough then we saw thousands were still too few and today we can't even count all the dead Everywhere you look.

Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece a roll of paper thirty yards long which I filled completely with minute handwriting in my dungeon years ago It vanished when the Bastille fell it vanished as everything written everything thought and planned will disappear

I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.

Woe to the man who tries to stretch the imagination of man He shall be mocked he shall be scourged by the blinkered guardians of morality.

Against Nature's silence I use action In the vast indifference I invent a meaning I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes

Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race I hate Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face that can bear everything this goads us to greater and greater acts

Charlotte Corday walked alone Paris birds sang sugar calls Charlotte walked down lanes of stone through the haze of perfume stalls Charlotte smelt the dead's gangrene Heard the singing guillotine

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out We invented the Revolution but we don't know how to run it Look everyone wants to keep something from the past a souvenir of the old regime This man decides to keep a painting This one keeps his mistress He [ pointing ] keeps his garden He [ pointing ] keeps his estate He keeps his country house He keeps his factories This man couldn't part with his shipyards This one kept his army and that one keeps his king

Long ago I left heroics to the heroes

However hard we try to bring in the new; it comes into being only in the midst of clumsy deals.

So the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness

In Dante the hero would rather flee and renounce the tempting embrace instead of yielding to his desires and enduring the attendant dangers.

Don't soil your pretty little shoes The gutter's deep and red Climb up climb up and ride along with me the tumbrel driver said But she never said a word never turned her head Don't soil your pretty little pants I only go one way Climb up climb up and ride along with me There's no gold coach today But she never said a word never turned her head