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News
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Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
-Milan Kundera
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Nudity
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
-Milan Kundera
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Optimism
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
-Milan Kundera
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Relationships
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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
-Milan Kundera
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Ridicule
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
-Milan Kundera
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Sex
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
-Milan Kundera
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Shame
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
-Milan Kundera
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Solitude
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Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
-Milan Kundera
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Tools
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
-Milan Kundera
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Travel
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A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
-Milan Kundera
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Women
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Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!
-Milan Kundera
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Books by and about Milan Kundera