Quotes by British Authors - Page 160

Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.
Max McKeown
A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.
Max McKeown
Consider and then act, don't react. A worthy opponent will calculate his move to entice a response from you. Make your own play.
R.D. Ronald
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
G H Hardy
You want leaders driven by mission – not by adrenaline. No one wants to work with people who need to be heroes more than they need to be catalysts.
Robert Watson
Catastrophe is change on the fast track. Disaster is a laboratory for adaptability.
Robert Watson
... throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless theapproach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent's unreadyness to meet it.The indirectness has usually been physical, and always psychological.
B.H. Liddell Hart
Strategies that did well in competition with other strategies were not, however, those that maximized the returns to agents. Rather, we found a strong inverse relationship between the mean fitness of individuals in populations containing only one strategy, and that strategy's performance in the tournament. This finding illustrates the parasitic effect of strategies that rely heavily on OBSERVE. Strategies using a mixture of social and asocial learning are vulnerable to being outcompeted by those using social learning alone, which may result in a population with lower average returns. These findings are evocative of an established rule in ecology; this specifies that, among competitors for a scarce resource, the dominant competitor will be the species that can persist at the lowest resource level. An equivalent rule may apply when alternative social learning strategies compete: the strategies that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning.
Kevin N. Laland
Gentlemen, when the enemy is committed to a mistake we must not interrupt him too soon.
Horatio Nelson
The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one's own strength but in the exploitation of the other side's weaknesses.
John Christopher
Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.
Mark Lawrence
What is sometimes thought to be clever is, significantly often, merely an advanced form of foolishness.
Idries Shah
Illusions connected with religion are generally most difficult to remove.
John Meade Falkner
Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.
Tom Holt
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
Virginia Woolf
She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.
D.H. Lawrence
How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.
Dorothy Bussy
Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.
Aldous Huxley
The more important one feels the greater the illusion is.
Steven Redhead
I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.
Isaiah Berlin
The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.
Tahir Shah
My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.
Tahir Shah
But love – don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? ... It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion.
Virginia Woolf
As usual, small towns like this were full of those who needed entertainment and whilst money was difficult to earn, the philosophy of giving the people what they wanted, which Franco lived by, had paid dividends.
Christopher Byford
Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.
Neil Gaiman
Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.
Neil Gaiman
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
D.H. Lawrence
But when you have order, you don't need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected. If you understand everything,' I said carefully, 'then there's no room left for magic. It's only when you're lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that's why they like us to live in chaos.
Bernard Cornwell
It was a survival thing: he didn't answer back, didn't say anything about job security for prison guards, debate the nature of repentance, rehabilitation, or rates of recidivism. He didn't say anything funny or clever, and, to be on the safe side, when he was talking to a prison official, whenever possible, he didn't say anything at all. Speak when you're spoken to. Do your own time. Get out. Go home. ... Rebuild a life.
Neil Gaiman
The gods," he said. "Imprisoned in a thought. And perhaps they were never more than a dream.
Terry Pratchett
The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to?
Terry Pratchett
I mean, it's one thing saying you've got the best god, but sayin' it's the only real one is a bit of a cheek, in my opinion. I know where I can find at least two any day of the week. And they say everyone starts out bad and only gets good by believin' in Om, which is frankly damn nonsense.
Terry Pratchett
Gods fight, Ragnar went on earnestly, and some win, some lose. The Christian god is losing. Otherwise why would we be here? Why would we be winning? The gods reward us if we give them respect, but the Christian god doesn't help his people, does he? They weep rivers of tears for him, they pray to him, they give him their silver, & we come along & slaughter them! Their god is pathetic. If he had any real power then we wouldn't be here, would we?
Bernard Cornwell
In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability...The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being--in Egypt, India or China--gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both...It's a curious fact that theall-male religions have produced no religious imagery--in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle.
Kenneth Clark
As someone has said "gods" is not really the plural of God; God has no plural.
C.S. Lewis
Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up.
Terry Pratchett
Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Arthur C. Clarke
So, in other words, we tore our world apart to get rid of these gods. And they were very bad gods, right?' I say, just to be clear. 'Not just messing around and having funsies with their adoring followers but truly wicked and vile?
Liz de Jager
I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.
Paul McAuley
Faith should mean something. Gods . . . should stand for something, not chop and change with every breeze that blows. Gods should be worshipped for the truths they represent, not what party favours they might dispense.”-Razor Eddie the Punk God of the Straight Razor
Simon R. Green
You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.
Stephen Hunt
Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...
Neil Gaiman
Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,-- her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.
Virginia Woolf
The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway.
Douglas Adams
Note to self," Joel commented. "When you go into Arious it's a 'no touchee, no zappee' situation! Paelen tapped Emily. "I suggest we try it again, just so I can see Joel's face when he gets zapped!" "Let's not, but say we did," Emily said.
Kate O'Hearn
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
Salman Rushdie
If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god IS a god.
Alan Moore
But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.
A.S. Byatt
He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble.Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god.
Neil Gaiman
The weather gods are toying with us." - Dr. James Stagg
David Haig
in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...
Neil Gaiman
Only the Gods are real.
Neil Gaiman
It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.
C.S. Lewis
It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.
Terry Pratchett
She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn't. She was like that.
Terry Pratchett
Jess wasn't religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.
M.R. Carey
I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said.
Neil Gaiman
the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.
C.S. Lewis
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.
Terry Pratchett