Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

German-born Painter, Film Director, Novelist, Playwright, Painter, Graphic Artist and Dramatist

"Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race."

"The only truths we can point to are the ever-changing truths of our own experience."

"The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes."

"Against Nature's silence I use action. In the vast indifference I invent a meaning. I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them. The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes. "

"With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art."

"Everything is the same as always."

"Something unfathomable lies behind every thought... something for which there aren't any words."

"We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out."

"Woe to the man who tries to stretch the imagination of man. He shall be mocked he shall be scourged by the blinkered guardians of morality."

"And now Marat now I see where this revolution is heading To the withering of the individual man and a slow merging into uniformity to the death of choice to self-denial to deadly weakness in a state which has no contract with individuals but which is impregnable."

"And for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out Neither side is glorious on either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing. Not to lie under the earth but to walk upon it without crutches."

"In Dante the hero would rather flee and renounce the tempting embrace instead of yielding to his desires and enduring the attendant dangers."

"Charlotte Corday walked alone. Paris birds sang sugar calls. Charlotte walked down lanes of stone through the haze of perfume stalls. Charlotte smelt the dead's gangrene heard the singing guillotine."

"Fight on land and sea. All men want to be free. If they don't never mind we'll abolish all mankind."

"Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece a roll of paper thirty yards long which I filled completely with minute handwriting in my dungeon years ago. It vanished when the Bastille fell it vanished as everything written everything thought and planned will disappear."

"Marat: Today they need you because you are going to suffer for them. They need you and they honor the urn which holds your ashes. Tomorrow they will come back and smash that urn and they will ask Marat who was Marat."

"Only in his poetry did he have the courage to love."

"What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling? I'd like to know who they think they are fooling. They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on."

"What's the point of a revolution without general copulation copulation copulation."

"We've got rights the right to starve. We've got jobs waiting for work. We're all brothers lousy and dirty. We're all free and equal to die like dogs"