Pasolini: The Ashes Of Gramsci

Will you ask of me, dead man, unadorned,
that I abandon this hopeless
passion to be in the world?

English text.

Happy birthday.
x

Antonio Gramsci: All About Strength

“My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall… that is my strength, my only strength.”

On Success/Happiness/Optimism: Apropos Of Nothing/Something/Everything

"I don't give a toss if people say I haven't fulfilled my promise. I think my values are right but I don't want to impose them on other people. I've been lucky enough to be born in a democratic country where I can say what I like, with parents who were decent, intelligent people, where I'm reasonably well off, and where I've met a lot of interesting people and been to some interesting places. How much luckier can you get?
"Life is a matter of passing the time enjoyably. There may be other things in life, but I've been too busy passing my time enjoyably to think very deeply about them." 

Peter Cook.

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan. 

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Elvis.

"Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent."

Noam Chomsky.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, 
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania."

Dorothy Parker.

"Fuck' em."

Mick Jones.

"Oh, what's the bloody point?"

Kenneth Williams. 

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."*

Antonio Gramsci. 

* There's some debate as to whether Gramsci ever said this, and it's nicked off someone else whatever, so don't write in Marxist pedants.