{"author":"Amin Maalouf","author_id":"Amin+Maalouf","total_quotes":19,"quotes":[{"text":"The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["communism","doctrine","liberalism","nationalism","religion","secularism"],"id":13385,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["knowledge","modernity","progress"],"id":26907,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["ancestors","family","happiness","life"],"id":59634,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["travel"],"id":105421,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["death","life","past","present"],"id":172753,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"... We die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["birth","death","life"],"id":174093,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["doctrine","philosophical"],"id":174677,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["identity"],"id":227729,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"...It's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["desire","love","remorse"],"id":251326,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"},{"text":"You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.","author":"Amin Maalouf","tags":["questions","answers","you "],"id":287226,"author_id":"Amin+Maalouf"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}