Quotes about maelstrom (10 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

"In the Storm" in Le Socialiste http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/05/01.htm as translated by Mitch Abidor (1 - 8 May 1904)
Context: The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.
And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.
The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in.
The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.
War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.

War , World , Peace

“Thus ends the voyage under the seas. What passed during that night — how the boat escaped from the eddies of the maelstrom — how Ned Land, Conseil, and myself ever came out of the gulf, I cannot tell.”

Jules Verne book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Voici la conclusion de ce voyage sous les mers. Ce qui se passa pendant cette nuit, comment le canot échappa au formidable remous du Maelstrom, comment Ned Land, Conseil et moi, nous sortîmes du gouffre, je ne saurai le dire.
Part II, ch. XXIII: Conclusion
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Sea , Night

“But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough—who denies it?—but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 8 (p. 142)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

World , Peace , Hell

“Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.”

Dennis Lehane book A Drink Before the War

Prologue.
A Drink Before the War (1994)

Hate , Justice

“Do you know freedom exists in a school book
Did you know madmen are running our prisons
Within a jail
Within a gaol
Within a white free protestant maelstrom
We're perched headlong on the edge of boredom
We're reaching for death on the end of a candle
We're trying for something that's already found us.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)

Death , Books , School , Freedom

“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.”

Primo Levi book The Mirror Maker

"The Premise," The Mirror Maker (1986)

Search , Memory , Time , Clothes

“A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1944) Dutch computer scientist

Ken Brown's Motivation, Release 1.2 http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/followup/.
The "Linux is Obsolete" Debate

People

“I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994)
Context: I have always considered my life a private affair and the business of no one beyond my family and those I love. Except for moral and political issues that aroused in me a desire to speak out, I have done my utmost throughout my life, for the sake of my children and myself, to remain silent … But now, in my seventieth year, I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.

Life , Children , Truth

“Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: A fifth kind of semantic awareness has to do with what might be called the "photographic" effects of language. We live in a universe of constant process. Everything is changing in the physical world around us. We ourselves, physically at least, are always changing. Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. The names we use tend to "fix" that which is named, particularly if the names also carry emotional connotations... There are some semanticists who have suggested that such phrases as "national defense" and "national sovereignty" have been... maintained beyond the date for which they were prescribed. What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

Change

“The Conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: Liber Kaos (1992), p. 87
Context: The Conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

Feeling