As we know, these are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld
«Lenin’s origins on his mother’s side were far from ‘proletarian’, a fact which underlines the absurdity of the Bolshevik practice of evaluating a person by their social class. This criterion reached grotesque proportions in the 1920s and 1930s, when people even committed suicide on discovering a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘landowner’ skeleton in their past. The Party leaders were, of course, excused as a ‘revolutionary exception’.»
Dmitri Volkogonov: «Lenin»
«All for ourselves, and nothing for the people, seems, in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind». Adam Smith
«In the years 1950-1970 a quarter of the entire Greek labor force left to find work abroad: at the height of the emigration, in the mid-Sixties, 117,000 Greeks left their country every year». «In 1973, the remittances of workers abroad represented 90 percent of Turkish export earnings, 50 percent of export earnings in Greece, Portugal and Yugoslavia».
Tony Judt «Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945»
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse". Emperor Charles V
«Όπως συμβαίνει σε πολλούς άντρες που κατάφεραν κάτι σημαντικό, το συναίσθημα δεν είχε καμία σχέση με ιδιοτέλεια, συνίστατο, θα λέγαμε από βαθιά αγάπη για το κοινό και υπεράνω προσώπων ωφέλιμο’ με άλλα λόγια σε μια ειλικρινή εκτίμηση εκείνου που πάνω του οικοδομεί κανείς το προσωπικό συμφέρον, όχι «επειδή» το οικοδομεί, αλλά «εν αρμονία» και ταυτοχρόνως «ούτως ώστε» και «δια γενικότερους λόγους»». Ρ. Μούζιλ
‘The whole magic of [a] well-ordered society is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself’’ Mirabeau
‘‘Around 1750, the nation, satiated with verses, tragedies, comedies, operas, novels, romanesque stories, with moral reflections still more romanesque, and with theological disputes over grace and convulsions, set itself to reason about grains’’ Voltaire
"Επειτα από τόσα λαουρεάτα που τους εδώσανε οι εφημερίδες…τόσες ελληνικές σημαίες κυματίζουσες…τόσες ανεξαρτησίες αγερανίζουσες…τόσες δόξες εις τον αέρα…τόσα μεγαλεία στα σύγνεφα…". Ανδρ. Λασκαράτος
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