Quotes by British Authors - Page 699

Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.""Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.
Douglas Adams
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
Bertrand Russell
The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.
Terry Pratchett
A real girl isn't perfect and a perfect girl isn't real.
Harry Styles
Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Lewis Carroll
But Dumbledore says he doesn't care what they do as long as they don't take him off the Chocolate Frog cards.
J.K. Rowling
Don’t put your wand there, boy! ... Better wizards than you have lost buttocks, you know!
J.K. Rowling
Don't gobblefunk around with words.
Roald Dahl
Why it's simply impassible!Alice: Why, don't you mean impos
Lewis Carroll
He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.
P.D. James
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Winston S. Churchill
But life. It rushes by and then you think you'll see people... You think you'll do things and have time for this and time for that... And there is never time. This is what I have learned, Anna, I have learned that there is never as much time as you think there is. -(Ottmar)
Miranda Emmerson
Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) has appeared in the general population at approximately the same time as Bee Colony Collapse.
Steven Magee
At the same time that a massive deployment of biologically harmful radio frequency (RF) radiation devices across the mass population has occurred, we see the reduction of health care for the poor, sick and elderly.
Steven Magee
There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.
Steven Magee
Time is a random thing. It is the thing that makes us older. Humans use it to organize the world. They have invented a system to try to make order from randomness. The other humans, all of them but me, live their lives by hours and minutes and days and seconds, but those things are nothing. The universe would laugh at our attempts to organize it, if it could be bothered to notice them. Time is the thing that makes our bodies shrivel and decay. That is why people are scared of it.
Emily Barr
Other things my best friend said to me: That two years was but a short span.
Helen Oyeyemi
That which is timeless is also the most timely.
Joseph Pearce
Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise.
C.S. Lewis
Nurture a desire to be free from the clock.
Fennel Hudson
there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together.
Helen Simpson
... truth has a certain buoyancy - it makes its way to the surface, in time.
Jacqueline Winspear
Nothing was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed.
Sue Townsend
I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.
Neil Gaiman
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T.S Eliot
Each of us has a cuckoo clock inside of them.For some it never chimes.For some it chimes only intermittently.For some it chimes on every hour.While for others it never stops chiming.Think about it!
Anthony T.Hincks
The illusion is time itself.
Anthony T.Hincks
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
Matt Haig
But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.
Scarlett Thomas
Time waits for no man"That is what they say.That is why our time spent together,is so special in so, so many ways.
Anthony T.Hincks
Beyond all of those places, here they would be. He pressed tighter into Fen's embrace. This place had forever in it. Time couldn't end it, nor even the limits of life. Not distance—not even the wastes of the wild North Sea.
Harper Fox
What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead. 'Beg pardon?' 'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.
Natasha Pulley
Time goes, you say? Ah no!Alas, Time stays, we go;Or else, were this not so, What need to chain the hours,For Youth were always ours?Time goes, you say?-ah no!Ours is the eyes' deceitOf men whose flying feetLead through some landscape low; We pass, and think we seeThe earth's fixed surface flee:-Alas, Time stays,-we go!Once in the days of old,Your locks were curling gold,And mine had shamed the crow. Now, in the self-same stage,We've reached the silver age;Time goes, you say?-ah no!Once, when my voice was strong,I filled the woods with songTo praise your 'rose' and 'snow'; My bird, that sang, is dead;Where are your roses fled?Alas, Time stays,-we go!See, in what traversed ways,What backward Fate delaysThe hopes we used to know; Where are our old desires?-Ah, where those vanished fires?Time goes, you say?-ah no!How far, how far, O Sweet,The past behind our feetLies in the even-glow! Now, on the forward way,Let us fold hands, and pray;Alas, Time stays,-we go!
Henry Austin Dobson
Sufis deny the absolute reality of time, space and physical form. These things are both relative and local. They only appear to be absolute.
Idries Shah
Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty'And particling, I shouldn't wonder' said the Alderman
Terry Pratchett
Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.
H.G.Wells
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
Oliver Sacks
And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.
Terry Pratchett
It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery.
Alan Moore
Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.
Oliver Sacks
School taught me how to do language, maths and science; it failed to teach me the very basics of how to keep my home healthy.
Steven Magee
... With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.
Nicholas Gane
... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).
Nicholas Gane
... It is not possible, says Weber, to confer the objective validity of facts on the basis of a value-judgement; and second, it is not possible to judge the value of values through the use of scientific reason. This leads him to maintain a distinction between science and ethics, the former dealing with questions of fact, the latter with questions of value.
Nicholas Gane
Pre-modern forms of authority , based predominantly upon value-rationality and natural law, are here succeeded by legal-rational forms of domination and by the rule of instrumental reason. With this, religious beliefs and ultimate ideals gradually recede from (public) life as they are disenchanted by the claims of 'rational' science and are replaced increasingly by the idealized pursuit of secular, material ends. This leads to a world in which questions of meaning and value disappear from the public arena, and in which the scope for creative action and for the pursuit of ultimate values becomes increasingly restricted. And in this regard, the twin processes of cultural and social rationalization lead to the same end: to a condition of nihilism in which the highest 'ultimate' values are devalued, or devalue themselves, and hence, for the most part, are no longer able to guide social action, which itself becomes, in turn, increasingly routinized and mundane.
Nicolas Gane
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
Douglas Adams
This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger
Arthur C. Clarke
Science, while of value in so far as it can be used to address and even answer logical or technical questions, cannot and thus should not be used to create new (ultimate) values or provide a final judgement on the legitimacy of values themselves. Weber argues that it is the duty of the vocational scientist to recognize this, and to avoid at all costs presenting academic prophecies in the guise of value-free science. This calls not simply for the vocation of science to be imbued with a sense of ethical responsibility, but for science itself to be a self-reflective practice, one that identifies and calls into question its own presuppositions. In this respect, Weber, like Nietzsche, argues that 'science requires superintendence and supervision', for it is to proceed within strictly defined limits, and beyond this is to remain accountable for its own presuppositions or values. And it is on this basis that science may assume an objective form, and with this become, paradoxically, a practice that is valuable, if not necessarily meaningful, in its own right... it is, in general, to serve life and not vice versa...
Nicholas Gane
... Protestantism, in its quest for 'rational knowledge' of God's purpose and for an understanding of this world, engendered its own demise, for it lent legitimacy to a secular science that in turn rejected and devalued all religious values. And in this respect, Protestantism effectively devalued or disenchanted itself, for in its attempt to prove its own intrinsic rationality through non-religious means it affirmed the value of science, and with this laid itself open to the charge of irrationalism and to attack from the outside from 'rational', secular forms of this-worldly legitimation.
Nicholas Gane
... Science... denude(s) all religious beliefs... denigrating them as irrational forms of superstition or myth regardless of their intrinsic rationality or value.
Nicolas Gane
It is not necessary to be large to be a perfectly good arthropod (or mollusc, come to that).
Richard Fortey
... Weber insists that the value of science is always to be questioned and not simply presupposed... He is... critical of the presupposition which underlies Strauss' position, namely that scientific reason is necessarily of value.
Nicholas Gane
... As Weber suggests, once science is employed to justify and enact ideal values, especially through the actions of an elite few (the academy), particular values, in this case the idea of what is 'natural', are cast into an objectively valid and legitimate form, and thus appear as being beyond critique. And at this point Weber rightly warns that science, contrary to Durkheim's belief, is not both cognitive and moral in nature, for it rests upon a designation of authority, and may, especially if used beyond its own limits, give rise to new means of domination.
Nicholas Gane
You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for... two hundred years?' murmured Richard. 'You'd think someone would notice, or think it was odd.''Oh, that's one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,' said Reg, 'everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we'd be here till Christmas.
Douglas Adams
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
In The Inhuman... Lyotard, like Weber, reminds us of the distinction between technological development and 'human' progress. He argues, in particular, that the development of technology, or 'techno-science', is driven by the quest for maximum efficiency and performance, and as such leads to the emergence of new 'inhuman' (technological) forms of control rather than to the emancipation of 'humanity'. Lyotard reasserts the instrumental nature of the modern system, arguing that 'All technology ... is an artefact allowing its users to stock more information, to improve their competence and optimize their performances'. In this view, techno-science may be seen to stand against all instances of the unknown, including the aporia of the future anterior, and thus to have little respect for forms which are different or other to itself. This is compounded by the fact that technological development is intimately connected to the drive for profit. Lyotard proposes that this directs the production of knowledge and conditions the nature of knowledge itself, for information, itself a commodity, is increasingly produced in differentiated, digestible forms ('bits') for ease of mass exchange, transmission and consumption, and with the aim of enabling the optimal performance of the global system.
Nicholas Gane
Lyotard develops and extends Weber's argument regarding the disenchantment of art to suggest the Western culture increasingly obeys an instrumental logic of performance and control, one that imposes order on the free play of the imagination and subordinates creative thought to the demands of the capitalist market. And, for Lyotard, the effects of this process are consistent with those outlined in Weber's work, namely the progressive elimination of ritual or religious forms of art, the restriction of creative forms by an instrumental (capitalist) rationality, and with this the denigration of value-rational artistic practice.
Nicholas Gane
[Art] acts as 'an instrument allowing us to see through the gaps of dominant ideologies, and the source from which new methods could be drawn in the struggle against the system(s)'.
Nicholas Gane
Neuroscience is fast developing the technical and conceptual wherewithal to reveal in fine, bare detail the neurobiological substrates of the mind. Perhaps it will despoil a sacred myth - the myth of selfhood and souls. And, if so, we may be wandering innocently into the opening phase of a dangerous game. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves - autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, then what?
Paul Broks
Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them.
James Burke