Quotes by Romanian Authors - Page 3

I'm always under surveillance from both the NSA, the Russian KGB, and the Bulgarian Army, so I'm the most invisible.
Stefan D
Create content to add value, not to get likes.
Alin Sav
Truth doesn’t need to be defended. Truth just is.
Dragos Bratasanu
- Sort out the sort ofs from the maybes, and maybe you will start walking in the right direction, like you’re on a treadmill. - You have your direction. I have my direction. As for the correct direction, the one direction - it does not exist...-Jarod Kintz and Stefan D
Stefan D
Vision, not need, is what attracts money.
Alin Sav
In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness.An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength...Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.
Edward N. Luttwak
Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making.At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work.Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense.It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Edward N. Luttwak
How many minutes will still die in the swamp of your illusion of being human?
Sorin Cerin
Could there ever be a wise man without the wisdom or life or without the death of illusion?
Sorin Cerin
How much weight can carry a thought which does not acknowledge that it is an illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Where do we people go if not towards the perfection of our own illusion?
Sorin Cerin
Which eternity can be bigger or smaller? But which reality can be an eternity in your mind?
Sorin Cerin
There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.
Elie Wiesel
Rain drops are not the ones who bring the clouds.
Sorin Cerin
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Mircea Eliade
[I]n 1919, 1920 and 1921, the whole Israelite press stormed the Romanian state unleashing everywhere chaos and exhorting to violence against the regime, the form of government, the Church, the Romanian order, the national idea, patriotism. Now, as if by magic (in 1936), the same press, led exactly by the same people, has turned into a protector of the state order and its laws, and declares itself 'against violence', and we have become the 'enemies of the country', the 'right-wing extremists', 'in the pay and in the service of the enemy of Romanicity', and, before long, we will hear even this: that we are sponsored by the Jews.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.
Emil M. Cioran
It had been an embarrassing moment, like the one you get when you realize for the first time that you have what it takes to become an accountant.
Sorin Suciu
Many things have been compared to a brick, mainly as a tribute to their intellect or to their aerodynamic characteristics.
Sorin Suciu
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.
Emil M. Cioran
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emil M. Cioran
I was all too aware that there's an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due tot he cold, and I believed myself.
Herta Müller
Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, head, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.
Dagobert D. Runes
Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.
Corneliu E Giurgea
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
Emil M. Cioran
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
Emil M. Cioran
True honor does not crave recognition, as true wisdom craves not publicity. The great heroes and the great men of wisdom walk silently through the bypaths of mankind.
Dagobert D. Runes
Generations can follow this destiny, can stay close to it or depart from it, having thus the capability of giving to their nation a maximum of life and honor or a maximum of dishonor and shame. Sometimes only isolated individuals, abandoned by their generation, can reach this destiny. In that moment, they are the people, they speak in its name. All the millions of dead and of the martyrs of the past are with them, as well as the nation's life of tomorrow.
Corneliu Codreanu
And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.
Mircea Eliade
Windisch closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face.
Herta Müller
Wisdom opens the eyes of love.
Marieta Maglas
Your eyes will always be closer to your soul than to any other part of your body except the heart.
Sorin Cerin
Only in the eyes of love you can find infinity.
Sorin Cerin
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .
Emil M. Cioran
To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
Herta Müller
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emil M. Cioran
We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?
Elie Wiesel
There is a form of clean energy, renewable and absolutely free that too often underestimate: human warmth.
Corina Abdulahm-Negura
WRITE. Take your time and play with the words until you feel you got them RIGHT.
Nico J. Genes
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, full of unknowns, asking questions but raising possibilities.
Florian Armas
Love your work and success is your next customer.
Alin Sav
Entrepreneurs don´t play safe, they play good.
Alin Sav
You don´t have to win the game, play until the others get tired.
Alin Sav
Do not ask intelligent rich people what car they driver, but what books they read.
Alin Sav
Wrong partners cost much more money than bad financial investments.
Alin Sav
I am dreaming of entrepreneurs who earn by giving.
Alin Sav
The sales process ends/failed when the client feels that you want his money, more than his benefits.
Alin Sav
The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.
Alina Stefanescu
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil M. Cioran
Simon did not solve problems, he just shamed them into going away.
Sorin Suciu
Our secrets, odd or not, are the pins that keep our inner life in place: the inform our psyche with meaning.
Andrei Codrescu
The fact is we all know that there exists in the world an order different from that in which we pass our days. If we reveal its existence people think that we are crazy.
Andrei Codrescu
I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.
Elie Wiesel
War is like night, she said. It covers everything.
Elie Wiesel
Man asks and God replies but we don't understand his replies because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.
Elie Wiesel
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silent encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.
Elie Wiesel
This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
Elie Wiesel
He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Herta Müller