Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies.

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room. If you had 10 incredibly bright people, nothing would come out of it.

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

What drives the separation of groups of people into subgroups is the desire to control resources. We begin with a single culture, and over time the number of individuals within that culture expands.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

The commercial cities... are as different in sentiment and character from the country people as any two distinct nations, and are clamorous against the order of things established by the agricultural interest.

the latent causes of faction [which causes men] to vex and oppress each other.

If three come together let them pick a leader.

The academic mind, as we know, is sometimes capable of assuming an aggressive attitude. The official mind, on the contrary, is and has to be, expert in the art of self- defense.

Democrats cluster in cities, and Republicans don't.

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.

The problem with a group is, the more people you add, the lower the average IQ.

We thought a human city is kind of like that watering hole. It's where different groups come together and have to find ways to live and survive and cohabit and cooperate, but they may not always see eye-to-eye.

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.