A Quote by J. G. Ballard

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

J. G. Ballard

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Achieved Affairs Any Architecture Bars Between Buchenwald Century Dungeons Even Fashion Final Gaps Grace Grave Heaven Hell Hell Is Horror Institutional Kind Marked More Nagasaki Never One-Way Out Own Point Possibility Present Private Rate Reached Redemption Skull Some Spires Terminal Than Tickets Valid Way Which Whose Worlds

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J. G. Ballard
British - Novelist
November 15, 1930 - April 19, 2009

Hell is out of fashion --institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. . .

J. G. Ballard

There is a choice before us as people who live in a great world, so knit together that even America cannot stand quite outside it, or act as though it were situated somewhere on the moon! That choice is a choice - let me put it quite brutally - between heaven and hell. ... But it is not a choice between a heaven or a hell beyond the grave; it is a choice between making heaven or making hell on this side of the grave, and in this world, here and now.

Maude Royden

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it: Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss! . . . When all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Christopher Marlowe

The Buddhist mind is more complicated than the Christian mind. It comes up with endless heavens, endless hells, endless earths, and then we have something lower than hell. We have endless sub-realms that make hell look like Club Med and we have endless nirvana.

Frederick Lenz

Differences in racial outcomes are not the same thing as institutional racism any more than the fact that far more men than women are locked up is evidence of institutional sexism.

Munira Mirza

The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.

Tony Judt

Sin is hell, grace is heaven; what madness it is to look more at hell than heaven.

Thomas Brooks

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

Elie Wiesel

You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing.

Jerry Stahl

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

Isaac Asimov

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

Rob Bell

D-Day represents the greatest achievement of the american people and system in the 20th century. It was the pivot point of the 20th century. It was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the 20th century. Is it going to be Nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democracies going to prevail?

Stephen Ambrose

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

Flannery O'Connor

I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.

Christine Jennings

I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die.

Al Franken

Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individual experience.

Aldous Huxley

A Quote by J. G. Ballard

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