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We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit — against an opinion.

— Octavio Paz Alternating Current (1967)

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More quotes by Octavio Paz

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)

Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world.

The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it.

Alternating Current (1967)

All Octavio Paz quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Octavio Paz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.