Quotes by Authors - Page 30

Conscience defined by the elders,passed on to the next generations.
Toba Beta
What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113
Miles Harvey
If you want to win, drop the past trends. Genius creates new trends and the crowd follows the past.
Amit Ray
How do you know about the world is real?...How?...How you don't think that you are locked in matrix... which is programmed by a genius or something more further... which we don't believe it goes like fatasy and science fiction which is ...we are cursed by a witch and we stay in a box... full of illusions.
Deyth Banger
One of the best examples of a polymath is Leonardo da Vinci. Born in Italy in 1452, Leonardo was a sculptor, painter, architect, mathematician, musician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, botanist, geologist, cartographer and writer. Although he received an informal education that included geometry, Latin and mathematics, he was essentially an autodidact, or a self-taught individual.
James Morcan
Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt."You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth.
Rick Riordan
I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?
Alan Moore
If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.
Van Jones
...the Northern Rockies region is a rapidly changing part of the United States. Ironically, in many areas today's number-one threat is not clear-cutting, overgrazing, or destructive mining practices. It is something more insidious. Well-meaning people, many of them former visitors who were seduced into moving to the glorious region, are loving it to death.
Michael McCoy
Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
Derrick Jensen
We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.
Russell Gold
Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it's princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don't want to head down
Russell Gold
Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?
Russell Gold
Seems like people always want to think they're doomed. It brings them some kind of black comfort, I guess.Nate
C.J. Box
In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.
Ronald Geigle
Take the time to get it right. There'll be gas tomorrow night
Russell Gold
I don't fear fracking. I fear carbon
Russell Gold
In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?
Adam Minter
Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression.
Steven Magee
The fish, whose tail was nipped, separated itself from the group and began to appear sickly, most likely from stress, Coal reasoned. He refused to be this fish, or the belly up fish, or the blue fish gasping for air. Rather, he resolved to be the other fish, the one who found purpose and meaning despite the unnatural environment, despite depending upon keepers for survival.
Jesikah Sundin
When we are in a wrong environment, we feel so paranoid, yet unwilling to move out. There's no need for pussyfooting, we got to release our poisonous fluid and scream aloud, storming  out of the show like a radical.
Michael Bassey Johnson
The scandal with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is how it managed to obtain a construction permit to build a manned telescope in a known biologically toxic environment to workers. How many more people need to die, get injured or develop long term very high altitude sickness that will last a lifetime?
Steven Magee
There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.
Tim Winton
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
Gloria Steinem
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
Steven Magee
When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.
Steven Magee
When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.
Steven Magee
Create an environment to grow consistently and to influence everyone around you positively. Your future doesn’t have to equal your past. You are designed to achieve greatness, to be happy and to live the life you deserve. Start with setting a P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E. Goal.™
Farshad Asl
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.
Virginia Woolf
Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.
Joseph LaConte
When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.
Jonathan Campbell
Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).
Mark Leibovich
I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).
Ron Brackin
I'm nostalgic for a better tomorrow.
Brian Spellman
You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
Julian Barnes
The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behaviour betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections. It brings him not special pleasure. He simply is that way.
Ryszard Kapuściński
I wish there wasn't such a division between people who believe certain things and people who don't. It seems vastly hypocritical on both ends, these two groups of people both claiming to believe in good things and yet willing to do bad things to each other for disagreeing.
Kevin Breel
It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
This made my father laugh. 'Mary made a cake, did she? Well, well. Better that than she should make a cake for herself, I suppose.'Peter then burst out: 'Why must you always be making a game of Mary? 'Tis not fair; 'tis not sporting.
Jennifer Paynter
Never has God given waivers to family members, just because they had bad leaders. In Jonah's time, the entire family of Israel had become unacceptable, but never has any Israelite administration been without some injustice, intolerance and alienation from God--much less today's earthly family. Even during the celebrated reign of Solomon, Solomon was multiplying wives and horses--against God's written counsel. It has always been so.Regardless, Israel was one family. They were expected to stick together whether they were in exile, or at home living in abundance. No deserters, or pious arm-folders were allowed. As Jonah discovered, no quitters were allowed. (page vi)
Michael Ben Zehabe
I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.
Ron Suskind
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
You can't train people loyalty. A person with loyalty is a great asset than a smart but disloyal one...
Assegid Habtewold
The last week hadn’t been any better, come to think of it. On Monday they arrived at Gorda, just to find that the cargo of electronics he was to ship to Beowulf had been taken by another freighter for a lower fee. It took him until Wednesday before he found another cargo – which had to reach Earth by Saturday. The last straw was when his crew mutinied a day out of the Hermes system and demanded a pay increase. The union tended to call that sort of thing “collective bargaining”, not actually mutiny, but hey – the results are the same. He tended to favor the term “piracy”, but this wasn’t the high seas and out here, there were real pirates to worry about. His former crew had also wanted more time off and a better cook – at least one who knew how which end of a frying pan to hold. He was unable to comply, and so was forced to stop at Beowulf anyway. That was the last time he saw them. Fortunately for him, Weaver, Fuller and Jang opted to stay with him. Whether it was out of loyalty, or perhaps just convenience, he never knew.
Christina Engela
Loyalty is not loyalty unless one clings to it in the face of adversity.
Lisa Tawn Bergren
Only dogs know and respect their masters. This is a rare characteristic of men who secretly envy their masters and wish their downfall.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.
Steven Pinker
Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist” and the mistaken concept of necessary talent
Betty Edwards
Use your unique gifts and talents to make a difference in the world.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Real talent harnesses what it has and unlocks what it doesn’t. There is natural ability, there is the discipline that develops natural ability, there is the unending study of one’s craft, and there is the exponential lifting of performance by the selfless combination of efforts.
Ken Goldstein
What is your talent? What are your interests? What resources do you have at your disposal? What can you do? What would you like to do? What can you do? You could apply your outrage to activism. Get involved. Do something.
Christina Engela
Don’t keep your greatness; exhibit it to the admiration of all but note however also to keep your precious something hidden for discovery. When it is discovered, it shall win awe and admiration, and it shall be an inspiration!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Well, I miss my wife, you know," I said. "But I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with.
John Scalzi
If guilt can cause heartache, then I've definitely experienced it. Seeing Ivy hunched over and crying for probably the first time in her really long life is making me feel like the worst person in the world. With her tears streaked face in her hands, she looks so fragile, vulnerable, and human. I come forwards and give her a hug.
Colleen Boyd
The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
Kamila Shamsie
She was dry. She was lying on something soft. She was wrapped in quilts. There was a star of light drifting above her, and a smell like a herb garden. Taggle was a long warmth stretched out at one side, his chin in her hand, his tail curled over her neck. She thought they might be in heaven.Taggle farted.Plain Kate coughed and sneezed. And then she really was awake.
Erin Bow
Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health.
Tom Drury
Although the terminology implies scientific endorsement, false memory syndrome is not currently an accepted diagnostic label by the APA and is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Seventeen researchers (Carstensen et al., 1993) noted that this syndrome is a "non-psychological term originated by a private foundation whose stated purpose is to support accused parents" (p.23). Those authors urged professionals to forgo use of this pseudoscientific terminology. Terminology implies acceptance of this pseudodiagnostic label may leave readers with the mistaken impression that false memory syndrome is a bona fide clinical disorder supported by concomitant empirical evidence.(85)...... it may be easier to imagine women forming false memories given biases against women's mental and cognitive abilities (e.g., Coltrane & Adams, 1996). 86
Michelle R. Hebl
You have got to get creative if you want anyone to notice your goddamn teenage angst.
Nic Sheff
In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.
Bessel A. van der Kolk