Quotations

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The world is violent and mercurial...it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love...love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

Tennessee Williams in an interview with James Grissom

"The EU lives with Russia on a continent. It is very unwise to argue with a strong neighbour. The belligerent leaders of the EU member states are therefore in desperate need of replacement."

Robert Lemm, described by Wikipedia as 'a translator from Spanish to Dutch and a reactionary Catholic writer'.

"Emphasis on Russian culture has become more pronounced, and not only because of the war. Russia, having rejected ‘woke’ ideology when it emerged onto the global stage, has presented itself as the ‘true,’ or traditional, 20th-century Europe. This appeals even to many liberal Russians, who aspired to join the Western civilization of the past, but not what it has become today. Even among Russians who strongly opposed the war, there is a feeling of satisfaction that Russia no longer has to defer to the West culturally.

"Russia today is therefore a different country from the one that entered the war, with a greater sense of social cohesion and confidence in its own viability as a nation. In the long run, this may lead to profound changes in Russia’s identity. In the short term at least, it will sustain public willingness to continue the war."

Anna Matveeva, Responsible Statecraft, December 25 2025