Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983)

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."


"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

George Orwell
from Politics and the English Language
1946

The Draughtsman's Contract (dir Greenaway, 1982)

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Imitation of Horace
John Dryden
1685

______________________________

... ille potens sui
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
dixisse 'vixi: cras vel atra
nube poleum pater occupato

vel sole puro; non tamen irritum,
quodcumque retro est, efficiet, neque
diffinget infectumque reddet,
quod fugiens semel hora vexit.'

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Carminum Liber Tertius. xxix)

"Some say it's like a beautiful flower.

Some say it is a terrible power."

-Helium.
"Pat's Trick" (1995)

[still from "Honeycomb"]

Sarah de St Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904)

"... a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper."

-Sarah Orne Jewett

The Country of the Pointed Furs

1896

"I put a spell on you ..."

Stranger Than Paradise

(dir. Jarmusch, 1984)

A Night at the Opera (1935)

"Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor."
-Otis B. Driftwood.

... soul within the soul ...

"The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley.
from the Advertisement
of Epipsychidion (1829)

"Bliss is the plaything of the child— ..."

-Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"La propriété c'est le vol."

Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (1840)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

(né le 15 janvier 1809 à Besançon dans le Doubs, mort le 19 janvier 1865 à Passy, en France)

_____________________

"Alors qu'êtes-vous?"

"Un anarchiste."

— Et la lampe s'étant résignée à mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre
Chaque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir,
Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre!

Les Bijoux
Charles Baudelaire (1857)

The talking-type wireless ... with leather speaking trumpet ...

Orchestra:
['Who Were You With Last Night' very fast, 'Razza Ma Tazz']

Secombe:
Ah, what a composer that Richnah Wagner was. Now, tonight, the Goons, with the aid of a calibrated Turkish boot lathe and a portable volcano net, will re-enact a drama of crime. Mr. Greenslade?

Greenslade:
Yes, sir?

Secombe:
Tell the eager masses what we have in store for them.

Greenslade:
Rubbish.

Secombe:
Thank you. Yes, it's rubbish - but to make it more interesting we call it...


The Goon Show
Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers (27 May 1951)