Quotes by Critics - Page 31

I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?
Karel Čapek
If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.
Orson Scott Card
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H.L. Mencken
Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of thesinful.
Paul Bourget
I thought speakers didn't believe in sin," said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. "You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.
Orson Scott Card
The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.
Lorna Sage
He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
John Updike
She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it.And it's delicious.
Orson Scott Card
Let's fly away and live forever
Orson Scott Card
It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.
Orson Scott Card
I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.
Orson Scott Card
Throughout her life, she behaved as if she had never heard anyone suggest that a woman couldn't do entirely as she pleased.
Francine Prose
She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence.
Bonnie Greer
A woman is a deep Ditch, said he, her House inclines to Death and her Paths unto the Devil
Peter Ackroyd
There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.
Kingsley Amis
HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence.HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.LIZA [rising determinedly] I'll let you see whether I'm dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a teacher.HIGGINS. What'll you teach, in heaven's name?LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!
George Bernard Shaw
Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;God never made his work for man to mend.
John Dryden
As a general rule, nine tenths of happiness may be said to rest on the state of health; when this is perfect, anything and everything may be a source of pleasure; in illness, on the other hand, nothing, no matter what its nature may be, is capable of affording any real enjoyment.
Edgar Saltus
Race relations never improve in war time; they always worsen. And it is when the boys come home the Ku Klux Klans are organized. I believe with George Schuyler that the only really feasible way to improve the general situation of the American Negro is to convince more and more whites that he is, as men go in this world, a decent fellow, and that amicable living with him is not only possible but desirable. Every threat of mass political pressure, every appeal to political mountebanks, only alarms the white brother, and so postpones the day of reasonable justice.
H.L. Mencken
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.
George Bernard Shaw
Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation.""What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?""An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked."Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.Achillese handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it."You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly."I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong.
Orson Scott Card
Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.
Orson Scott Card
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.
Terry Eagleton
All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.
Terry Eagleton
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.
Sarah Thornton
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)...
George Orwell
In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem.
John Updike
I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either.
John Updike
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
George Orwell
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet
George Orwell
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.
Orson Scott Card
The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
Orson Scott Card
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
Orson Scott Card
a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.
Orson Scott Card
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
Orson Scott Card
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
Rémy de Gourmont
Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!
Robertson Davies
I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.
Hilary Mantel
All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.
Alphonse Karr
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.
Orson Scott Card
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. Mencken
I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
H.L. Mencken
Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.
Orson Scott Card
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
H.L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H.L. Mencken
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
H.L. Mencken
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.
George Orwell
Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
Orson Scott Card
As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.
Chinua Achebe
Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you’ll find that you’ve fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you’ll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you’ll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.
Hilary Mantel
The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by installments.
Henry James
If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.
George Bernard Shaw
A Very Short Song Once, when I was young and true, Someone left me sad- Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.
Dorothy Parker
And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.
George Orwell