Quotes by Writers - Page 135

No power is born of hate.All power and authority is born of love.Oh, you, who want any power somewhere!Ask yourselves who and what you love?
Osyp Nazaruk
It's clear that equality doesn't quite cut it. Asking for a sliver of disproportionate power is too polite a request. I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place.
Reni Eddo-Lodge
The day of democracy is past," he said. "Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before—it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth....
H.G.Wells
Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Pretense cannot sustain blind power.
Dejan Stojanovic
Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.
Charles Caleb Colton
When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.
Dejan Stojanovic
To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Kevin Alfred Strom
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).
Georges Bataille
Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Centuries of fighting, and for what? I say. "Today it ends. I can't live in fear any longer. I've cursed this power. I've both enjoyed and misused it. And I've hidden it away. Now I must try to wield it correctly, to marry it to a purpose and hope that is enough.
Libba Bray
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass
profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass
Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.
Libba Bray
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
Charles de Gaulle
By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep
Oliver Burkeman
For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones
Oliver Burkeman
It is not our right to punish one for thinking as he does, no matter how much we disagree.
Oliver Bowden
These bits of paper are covered with lies. They poison your minds. And so long as they exist, you cannot hope to see the world as it truly is.(...)You turn to them for answers and salvation. (...) You rely more upon them than upon yourselves. This makes you weak and stupid. You trust in words. Drops of ink. Do you ever stop to think of who put them there? Or why? No. You simply accept their words without question. And what if those words speak falsely, as they often do? This is dangerous.
Oliver Bowden
Only a mind free of impediment is capable of grasping the chaotic beauty of the world. This is our greatest asset.
Oliver Bowden
My greatest strength is an unfocused mind. This is because while you are all thinking of one idea, I’m thinking of five different ideas. My greatest weakness however is an unfocused mind. This is because while I’m supposed to be thinking about one thing, I’m actually thinking of five other things.
Ben Mitchell
How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.
Aleksandar Hemon
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it.
Herman Melville
The mind reels.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.
Stanisław Lem
It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of “understanding the essence of things,” matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations.
Stanisław Lem
Art speaks to the soul, not the mind.
Aidan Crowe
There's an apt expression: 'If you don't live in your body, where are you going to live?' But many of us don't. We tend to get locked into our heads or our imaginations . . . recognizing the importance of the body is primary. It's who we are, it's where we live, it houses and embodies your mind and imagination.
Bill Connington
We’re not broken. We’re not in the wrong bodies. We’re not inadequate. We’re not lesser. We’re not unwanted. We’re not fraudulent. We’re not undesirable. That’s all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the experience of the prisons we put ourselves in.
Agnostic Zetetic
What you feed in yourself that grows.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To end the greatest work designed,A thousand hands need but one mind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous Huxley
A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories.
Rebecca McNutt
When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye, and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in magnitude.
Samuel Johnson
The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died—to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Golden eagles don`t mate with bald eagles, deer don`t mate with antelope, gray wolves don`t mate with red wolves. Just look at domesticated animals, at mongrel dogs, and mixed breed horses, and you`ll know the Great Mystery didn`t intend them to be that way. We weakened the species and introduced disease by mixing what should be kept seperate. Among humans, intermarriage weakens the respect people have for themselves and for their traditions. It undermines clarity of spirit and mind.
Russell Means
I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.
S.J. Watson
Sorry... my mind was wandering... one time it went all the way to Venus and ordered a meal I couldn’t pay for.
Steven Wright
You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.
Giovanni Boccaccio
...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.
Charlie Brooker
After all, Betty was ill and she was her sister, and she wouldn't be able to shave her legs for weeks because of the plaster.
Eva Ibbotson
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.
Liane Moriarty
Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.""I know," she said. "Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We have this judgmental way of looking at the idea of leaving a home or a family, and our society has reinforced this idea that if we "run away," we are "running away from our problems." In some cases, though, to face certain problems (in this case, two family members who are not mentally stable and who are not going to face up to their issues) the family members who are capable of facing reality must realize that leaving is a viable option. Some environments are harmful. As fellow humans it is our job to judge less and encourage more when others choose to remove themselves from harmful environments.
A.S. King
I sometimes heard the parents of Michel's playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed "a moment to themselves." The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier. I've always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be.
Herman Koch
Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It’s a house like every other house… but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place… and that’s what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That’s where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we’re no longer human at all, not really.
Rebecca McNutt
I don't really know a whole lot about complicated, worldly things. But I think parents and siblings, they need to be able to care for each other unconditionally. How many people could you risk your life to protect? Not that many, I bet. Everyone's top priority is taking care of themselves. But if there's anyone who can overcome that, it's flesh and blood. If you understand that feeling, then you can look at other people, and realize, this person's family cares about them, too. That's a really heavy feeling. When you think about that, it becomes a lot harder to do horrible things to them. So I think that love for your family....is really at the root of what it means to care for other people.
Mohiro Kitoh
It will no longer be necessary to leave one's own home in order to find work in the surrounding districts, which means spending week after week away from home, for no matter how restless a fellow might be, his own home, if he has a wife he respects and children he loves, has the same satisfying taste as bread, a man's home is not for all hours, but he soon begins to miss it if he does not go back there every day.
José Saramago
I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.
Rebecca McNutt
They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!”“Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget.
Rebecca McNutt
The Dutch fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that the blacks and whites are all children of one father, whom they call Adam. As for me, I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are.
Voltaire
Family don't end with blood
Eric Kripke