Monday, 13 February 2012

Jorge Luís Borges on Dictatorship and Immortality

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.

"The Immortal", § IV, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)


Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. 

Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946) 

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