9 Quotes by Christos Ikonomou

...power is synonymous with its own corruption, which is to say power equals corruption – and in the same way, truth is synonymous with its own transgression. Which means that in order to see the whole truth, you need to transgress it. In order to see truth in its entirety you have to get some distance, just as in order to see all of Earth, you have to travel thousands of kilometers into space.

The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We’re all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else’s affair. In our societies, the state has a monopoly on good. In order for a society to function in even the most basic way, the state has to have a monopoly on violence – but even more crucial is for the state to have a monopoly on good.

Deep inside each carried fear and stress and worry about illness and time, which came each day like a conscientious gardener to trim off a bit of their lives.

...when you’re young, you plan for the future, and when you’re old, you’re nostalgic for the past. So the whole joy of life disappears, the joy of the here and now. Feeling nostalgic for the past, planning for the future. Planning for the past, feeling nostalgic for the future. Today gets caught in a vise between tomorrow and yesterday, and it writhes and dies.

There are certain things it's hard to pull out from inside. Very hard. Impossible. It's like asking someone to cry from only one eye.

If you lose your father they call you an orphan. If you lose your wife they call you a widower. If you lose your child, what do they call you?That’s the only if I’m afraid of.If you lose your child, what do they call you? If.What?

Fairy tales, you’ll say. But you know what? People need a good fairy tale every now and then. People invented fairy tales and filled them with monsters so they wouldn’t become monsters themselves. Because the truth can turn you into a monster. You have to become a monster if you want to withstand the truth.

Becoming poor isn’t what breaks you. What breaks you is remembering that you didn’t used to be poor. That’s what breaks you.

...and I know it’s not terribly original, it’s nothing earth-shattering, I know it’s all been said a thousand times, but that may be true of everything in life that really matters, and anyhow, just because something isn’t original doesn’t mean it isn’t true, in fact maybe that’s how the truth usually is – monotonous, boring, not original at all.