Honoré Daumier Quotes
I care more about my pipe than about fame and honors.
Larkin, Oliver W. Daumier: Man of His Time. McGraw-Hill, 1966, p. 195.
Abu Nuas was not only gay but wrote much poetry about the beauty and love of homosexuality. He was a tutor to Caliph Muhammad al-Amin when the Caliph was a boy. The Caliph also had affairs with boys one of which was openly public. This Caliphate was a period of great scientific and cultural development in the Islamic world and at that time the Islamic world was the scientific and cultural leader of the world—far in advance of Christian Europe—still in the Dark Ages. Today, in most Islamic countries, and particularly Iran, homosexuals or those who write about it, if they get caught, are usually jailed or even executed—for the very activity that Abu Nuwas, a great Persian Poet and Abu Nuwas, the highest religious and civil authority in Islam openly engaged in. After about 1100. Islamic fundamentalists got control of the religion, closed the society to open inquiry and tolerance of ideas, and Islam has gone from the most advanced cultural and scientific culture in the world to one of the worst cultures in terms of modernism. Those Islamic fundamentalists who yearn for a return to the Caliphate know little about the history of that period or they would condemn it heartily. The situation is not dissimilar as for devout Roman Catholics who discovered that some Popes who were Saints were also libertines, married, had mistresses and children. In one case the son of the Pope himself became Pope. At first the reaction is to deny the happenings and ascribe to them falsehoods spread by enemies of the faith.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.
Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the second Napoleonic Empire in 1870. He earned a living throughout most of his life producing caricatures and cartoons of political figures and satirizing the behavior of his countrymen in newspapers and periodicals, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still known today. He was a republican democrat who attacked the bourgeoisie, the church, lawyers and the judiciary, politicians, and the monarchy. He was jailed for several months in 1832 after the publication of Gargantua, a particularly offensive and discourteous depiction of King Louis-Philippe. Daumier was also a serious painter, loosely associated with realism.
