Albert Camus - Napoleon Bonaparte - William Morris - Stanley Kubrick - Death of a Salesman 1985 - Sid Vicious - Charles de Gaulle - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Christopher Hitchens - Lt Col Karen Kwaitkowski - In Whose Interest? 2002 -
I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t. Albert Camus, The Stranger
A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. Napoleon Bonaparte
The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. William Morris
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. Stanley Kubrick
My salvation is that I never took any interest in anything. Death of a Salesman 1985 ***** starring Dustin Hoffman & John Meldovich & Stephen Lang & Kate Reid & Charles Durning & Louis Zorich et al, director playwright Arthur Miller, Charley
Today everything’s a conflict of interests. Sid Vicious
No nation has friends only interests. Charles de Gaulle
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship – though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H W Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The information that was being put out about the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States or United States’ interests was being grossly exaggerated. Sanctions had weakened Saddam Hussein ... The political perspective that Saddam Hussein must go was not based on intelligence. It was formulated and developed and articulated very publicly during the Clinton administration years. Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, Pentagon Office of Special Planning
After September 11th I wondered if our national interest conflicts with the interest of others. What’s driven our national interest? In a globalised world is putting national interest over a broader human interest actually in our interest? And do the government and media tell us the realities of US foreign policy? In Whose Interest? 2002
The United States has had its hand in a lot of places since World War II … In whose interest were these interventions? ibid.