
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Misattributed
"Death and the Compass"
Ficciones (1944)
Context: "It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber."
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Misattributed
What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936), Afterword of a later edition
This Book Will Save Your Life (2006)
The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)
“There is no reality for me but pure thought. Minds alone are interesting.”
Source: Pène du Bois (1897), p. 96.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 2 : The authority of the author : Biography and the reconstruction of the canon
Misattributed
Context: : In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/32-goldman2.htm — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net." More discussion on the origins of this quotation can be found at The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: Fair and Balanced Almost Every Day http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002422.html.