Slavoj Žižek; "Why be Happy, When You Can Be Interesting?"

(with gratitude and all my affection to the great p. postolovich, 

to whom, in relation to this as in many other things, i should have payed attention before, 

sending him the huge hug i seem unable to give him on the phone.)

“We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.”

“…I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.” 

“Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.” 

(Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights)