Garantia

Questionado numa audiência no comité da Cultura, Media, Digital e Desporto sobre a presença de Daniil Medveded, atual número um do ténis masculino — deixará de o ser na próxima segunda-feira —, no torneio de Wimbledon, o ministro avançou a possibilidade de uma "garantia" de que estes não defendem o regime de Vladimir Putin ser condição para atletas de modalidades individuais poderem competir no Reino Unido.

I'm here with my ego

I don’t know why I get on about myself. I don’t know anybody else. [Laughs] Someone called me, he says, You must be alone. I said, no, I’m here with my ego. [Laughs] 

Primatas como nós

«Sei que os meus pais não eram apenas aquilo que as minhas memórias de criança garantem que foram. Mas tive de chegar aos quarenta e um anos, tendo sido protagonista do medo, do falhanço, da imprudência, do enfado, do desgosto, da injustiça, do egoísmo, do remorso e da vergonha, para perceber que, embora sublimados na minha infância, eles seriam afinal como eu, como todos os outros: primatas de ânimo inconstante e satisfação temporária, julgando-se especiais de manhã e uma merda à noite; tão paralisados pela dúvida como errados nas certezas; irascíveis por estarem com fome ou sono; mesquinhos no exercício do poder, transportadores de arrependimentos, culpas e mentiras; trabalhando em algo de que não gostavam, ficando na cama numa manhã escura de janeiro; em pânico com a doença, cansados, com ciúmes, suscetíveis ao mau agoiro do boletim meteorológico; dispostos a morrer pelos filhos num dia, mas a atirá-los pela janela no outro.»

Filho da mãe, Hugo Gonçalves

Quixote

E é assim que Quixote é. Eu continuei durante tantos anos porque quando Quixote entra, quando o seu espírito entra em nós, de alguma maneira somos Quixote — e Quixote é sobre o fracasso. Ele simplesmente falha e falha, mas continua a levantar-se novamente, para fazer alguma coisa. E foi isso. Eu queria fazer o filme. Queria e todos me disseram para parar, para fazer outras coisas. Eu fiz outras coisas, mas voltei sempre para o Quixote e, nesse sentido, o que eu amava no Quixote foi o que fizemos no filme.

Jerky question

Not to ask the jerky question, but what do you say to the idea that it’s good that you guys are having a better time making the records but maybe the records were better when it was a struggle? Our job is not to make records that people like. Our job is to make the music that makes us feel proud. I’ve been pondering your questions: Is there something I’m missing here? Am I supposed to be thinking about what other people are thinking? Because with songwriting it’s almost like you can’t think about it in order to let it happen. Getting to some authenticity or relaying some experience — it’s about getting out of the way. 

Dig

«I was excited to go. I put on my straw hat and walked downtown, but when I got there, I couldn't bring myself to go in. By chance, Jimi Hendrix came up the stairs and found me sitting there like some hick wallflower and grinned. He had to catch a plane to London to the Isle of Wight Festival. When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people might think, he was shy, and parties made him nervous. He spent a little time with me on the stairs and told me his vision of what he wanted to do with the studio. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio.

"The language of peace. You dig?" I did.»

Just Kids, Patti Smith 

Irreverente e irrelevante

«I bought stacks of books, but I didn't read them. I taped sheets of paper to the wall, but I didn't draw. I slid my guitar under the bed. At night, alone, I just sat and waited. Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.»

Just Kids, Patti Smith 

Só miúdos

«We were walking toward the fountain, the epicentre of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.

"Oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists."

"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids."»

Just kids, Patti Smith

Deportado

Whether it was miscalculation, arrogance or some combination of the two that led Djokovic to think he could show up in Melbourne unvaccinated and just play, he now finds himself isolated in the tennis world. Few players have publicly supported him. The former world No. 1 Martina Navratilova said that she had always spoken up for Djokovic and felt that he got “a raw deal” from fans who were hostile to him. But not now.

“I’ve been defending Novak for many years,” she said, “but I cannot defend him on this one.”

Tell me why

«Que importância tem que eu acredite ou não? Escolhi este caminho, sinto-me útil! Que interesse tem saber se faço isso com sinceridade ou não? Faço alguma coisa, estou ao serviço de uma...[causa]»

Cevdet Bei e os seus filhos, Orhan Pamuk

Maleabilidade

«But what is also significant about Leon County is the role religion has played in residents’ low vaccination rates even when faced with death from the coronavirus. When my classmates were hospitalized with COVID-19, there were repeated calls for prayers and proclamations that God would provide healing. When they died, those prayer requests became comments that “God called [them] home.”»

No brainer

«For a long time I didn't understand why so many black people had abandoned their indigenous faith for Christianity. But the more we went to church and the longer I sat in those pews the more I learned about how Christianity works: If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you' re a savage. If you're Afrian and you pray to your ancestors, you're primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.»

Born a crime, Trevor Noah

Outsourcing

 «The problem of outsourcing morality is that it exacerbates the original problem of the absence of internal inhibitions or constraints. Everyone either will try to walk the fine line between legality and illegality (doing things that are unethical but technically legal) or will break the law while trying not to be caught. Breaking the law is not unique to today's commercialized societies. But what is unique is for people to claim that they have done everything in the most ethical manner possible if they have remained just barely on the right side of the law, or, if they have strayed into illegality, that is the business of others to catch them and prove they have broken the law. Internal check, stemming from one's own belief in what is moral and what is not, seem to play no role whatsoever. 

This is perhaps most obvious in commercialized sports, where the old-fashioned notions of fair play, which internalised acceptable conduct, have all but disappeared and have been replaced by behavior that, in some cases openly breaks the rules. Such behavior is fully accepted and even encouraged, since people believe that it is up to the referees alone to enforce the rules. Take the 2009 example of the famous soccer goal marked by hand by Thierry Henry, which allowed the French national team to qualify for the World Cup and sent the Irish team home. No one, from Henry to the last French supporter, denies that the goal was scored by hand, that it was illegal, and that is should not have been allowed to stand. But they would not draw the obvious consequences. In everyone's opinion the matter was not to be decided by Henry (say, by his telling the referee that the goal was illegal) or by his teammates (doing the same thing), but solely by the referee. Once the referee, not having seen how the goal was scored, has accepted it, the goal is as legal as can be, and there is no shame in celebrating it. Or even bragging about it.»

Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic

Distância

«Global inequality of opportunity is not generally considered a problem at all, much less a problem in need of a solution. Within nation-states, many people regard the intergenerational transmission of family-acquired wealth as rather objectionable; but among nations, the intergenerational transmission of collectively acquired wealth is not considered an object of concern. This is interesting because individuals' links to their family are closer than their links to an entire community, and one might thing that the transmission of family wealth across generations could be viewed as less objectionable than the transmission of societal wealth across generations of unrelated individuals. The reason that it is not seems to lie in one crucial difference, namely that in the first case, where the intergenerational transmission of wealth tase place within the same community, individuals can easily compare their positions with each other, and they resent injustice; in the other case, inequality is international, and individuals cannot easily compare themselves or perhaps they do not care to do so (or, at least, the rich do not). Distance, as Aristotle noted, often makes people indifferent to the lot of others, perhaps because they do not see them as peers with whom they compare their income or wealth.» 

Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic

Porsches e cozinhas

Não, até porque o foco está muito na pequena fraude com os fundos, estão a recuperar-se as histórias que ocorreram nos anos de 1980, 1990, do empresário que recebeu o dinheiro dos fundos europeus e que em vez de o investir foi comprar um Porsche. Essas fraudes, neste momento, estão muito mais controladas, diria que já não se fazem, mas que permitem ao discurso político vir dizer: ‘Como viram, isto correu tudo bem porque já ninguém comprou Porsches ou renovou a cozinha’. E é verdade que está tudo mais informatizado e é mais difícil fazer uma fraude desse género neste momento. Mas com o foco neste tipo de fraudes, esquece-se todo o resto, que é o que acontece a montante, e isto de duas formas: a primeira, é com a escolha dos projetos que são financiados, há vários tipos de financiamentos europeus, diversas formas de fazer o financiamento, que podem ir, por exemplo, para aquelas linhas de financiamento das empresas, e quando se fala de fraude, e é aí que devemos ter agora alguma da atenção. Mas há outras coisas. As grandes obras públicas têm sido financiadas por fundos europeus, e aí a questão não é tanto quem é que ficou com o dinheiro. Imagine-se que se volta a fazer um TGV, a escolha do TGV ou a opção por fazer um novo aeroporto, temos que pode ser desnecessária a obra em si, ou desnecessário o tamanho da obra, mas que se decide fazer porque se sabe que isso vai favorecer determinados grupos económicos, ou até a localização das obras. Fazendo-se uma grande obra no município x em vez de se fazer no município y, porque o município x é governado pelo partido do poder ou porque é necessário, também por razões políticas, que ali haja um determinado benefício.

Fome

«The assiduous food-habit of a lifetime had trained the English body to the pitch of producing a punctual nervous excitation in the upper belly at the fixed hour of each meal: and we sometimes gave the honoured name of hunger to this sign that our gut had cubic space for more stuff. Arab hunger was the cry of a long-empty labouring body fainting with weakness. They lived on a fraction of our bulk-food and their systems made exhaustive use of what they got.»

Seven pillars of wisdom, T. E. Lawrence

Pruning

Don’t be fazed by loss of friends, because it’s an opportunity to go off and make new friends, which may turn out to be even better.

Irrealismo prodigioso

«Se a História, no sentido restrito do «conhecimento do historiável», é o horizonte próprio onde melhor se apercebe o que é ou não é a realidade nacional, a mais sumária autópsia da nossa historiografia revela o irrealismo prodigioso da imagem que os Portugueses se fazem de si mesmos.»

O labirinto da saudade, Eduardo Lourenço

Direito

«O direito não é aquilo que eu desejo muito ou que sinto fortemente que me é devido. O direito é aquilo que os outros reconhecem como sendo o meu direito. Se os outros não reconhecem o meu direito, ou se só uma parte reconhece, ou ainda se reconhecem apenas em parte, nesse caso o que tenho não é um direito mas uma exigência.» 

Caros fanáticos, Amos Oz 

Virtude

«Céus não existem, não existe Inferno:
O prémio da virtude é a virtude, 
É castigo do vício o próprio vício»

Bocage