“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”
Pt. 1, ch. 3, sct. 3
Our Man in Havana (1958)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Graham Greene 164
English writer, playwright and literary critic 1904–1991Related quotes
As quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69
1950s
Re: Preventing a class from being instantiated http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3216091792432486@naggum.net.html (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous
“You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.”
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
Sphinx Society lecture, Brown University, April 3, 2003 (as reported in the Brown Daily Herald
“Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.”
