Rachid Taha Quotes

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate — disgusting behavior! (p. 46)

The bomb is in play! Dylan's called the AFRAT team! They're meeting me at the docks in twenty minutes! We're going to see if we can find it!

Gaza is being transformed as we speak from what a former British Prime Minister once called the world’s largest open-air prison into the world’s largest open-air death camp.

I call that my kung pow chicken.

Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

I've got a career. Don't you guys know that? A career! No mafia don invites me to a party. They keep on calling on Dawood twice a year. They keep on consulting him. They set the correspondence courses right. And me? No one just gives a damn for me. Hey! Won't I ever be able to become someone like Dawood Ibrahim?

She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.

It's important for communities to be put together on a different basis. It's really shitty that we're taught to be really patriotic when 99 percent of the shit that we wear and we use and eat and everything comes from everywhere all the time, and musically, it's the same.

James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. His honesty and courage would lead him to see truth and to write truth in poetry, drama, fiction, and essay. He was a giant.

A good storyteller is the conscience-keeper.

Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna.

When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows she is lying. I don’t think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that. But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous.

The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate,
But in this world, a spell of health is the best state.
What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war;
Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates.

A pretty little story is related by Stobæus: "A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, 'What do I get by learning these things?' So Euclid called his slave and said, 'Give him threepence, since he must make gain out of what he learns.