Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury

"He fought not only for himself, but clearly for other powers as well which he did not know, but in which, without infringing the regulations of the authorities, he was permitted to believe." - Franz Kafka, The Castle, chapter 5

"My old teacher [Albrecht] Ritschl once said that I drafted even my philology articles like a Parisian novelist - absurdly gripping." - F. Nietzsche, "Why I Write Such Good Books", Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are (1888)

Am I seeing things? 1595 engraving of Lucifer in an edition of Dante's Inferno; 1651 title page of Hobbes's Leviathan.

"It's amazing what those that can do anything can't do." - Victor Hugo, via Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (2007), 32

"You know better than me the unfortunate fate of this word 'normalization'. What is not normalization? I normalize, you normalize, and so on." Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Collège de France, 25 January 1978

"That which we see today is the sign of the past." - Basil of Caesarea, Homilies on the Hexaemeron 7, 1  

"At a time when people were generally decrying the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai, I met Karl Kraus struggling over one of his famous comma problems. He said something like: 'I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for… Continue reading Geo-politics & the placement of commas: Karl Kraus →

"By the time we are old we have undergone a great many murderous fashions, all those murderous fashions in art and in philosophy and in consumer goods." In a passage on Martin Heidegger - Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, 1985

"Clement of Alexandria was but one major Christian author who showed a strong interest in Indian and Egyptian wisdom traditions. Clement is the first Greek author to mention the Buddha and Buddhism."   - G. G. Stroumsa, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 104 Reijer Stolk, 1943 (Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)