Quotes by Writers - Page 149

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.
Roseanne Barr
When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt.
Libba Bray
Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.
Roseanne Barr
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Marie Shear
I'd much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they are the first to be rescued off of sinking ships.
Gilda Radner
The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.
Roseanne Barr
Sorry I'm late, I'm afraid I got lost on the path of life-Kakashi Sensei
Masashi Kishimoto
And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
Herman Melville
Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Life is a bitch; you get used though, or you kill yourself. Either way, you're winning.
Ahmed Mostafa
There is neither a Heaven nor a Hell. Life after Death is an oxymoron. Life is just another word for existence, and Death is just another word for non-existence.
Oliver Markus Malloy
There is neither a Heaven for a Hell. Life after Death is an oxymoron. Life is just another word for existence, and Death is just another word for non-existence.
Oliver Markus Malloy
On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question.
Aldous Huxley
In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.
George Saunders
They did not think politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say "'Ear, 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.
H.G.Wells
[H]e quoted eloquently from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and a section which had been stricken from his party's platform seventy-five years ago. He was not quite clear on what all this had to do with [the present situation], but it was noble and stirring and would bring in a lot of votes.
Mark Clifton
Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating...... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
In a democracy, of course, you always get a choice:Do you want to be governed by the red or by the blue? It's entirely up to you.Do you want to be patronized or condescended to by liars or by crooks? You get to choose.Would you prefer your fundamental values to be insulted or ignored by con men or by charlatans?In short, do you want your influence to be zero or nil?And when would you like to be listened to, never or not at all?It's your choice. Do you want some more choice?Take it or leave it. Now there's a real choice.
Pat Condell
They despite and hate the government more and more, but they don't know how to set about changing it. The country is dying for some sort of lead, and so far all it is getting is a crowd of fresh professional leaders. Who never get anywhere. Who do not seem to be aiming anywhere. We are living in a world of jaded politics. Poverty increases, prices rise, unemployment spreads, mines, factories stagnate, and nothing is done.
H.G.Wells
We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.
H.G.Wells
Look at the way people have swung through Communism, Toryism, Liberalism -- in vast blocks. In my father's boyhood you were either a Liberal or a Conservative in England, and there you stuck, and in America you were a sturdy individualist Democrat or Republican from the cradle to the grave. But now the Voice does it -- the pervading voice. And just nowit's come to a point when a Voice -- putting it straight and clear. Straight and clear...
H.G.Wells
Things were rather larger, more obvious and rougher on the American side, but the issues were essentially the same. The general public voted and demonstrated, but its voting seemed to lead to nothing. It felt that things were done behind its back and over its head but it could never understand clearly how. It never seemed able to get sound news out of its newspapers nor good faith out of its politicians. It resisted, it fumbled, it was becoming more and more suspicious and sceptical, but it was profoundly confused and ill-informed.
H.G.Wells
It doesn't take ten years of study, you don't need to go to the University, to find out that this is a damned good world gone wrong. Gone wrong, because it is being monkeyed with by people too greedy and mean and wrong-hearted altogether to do the right thing by our common world. They've grabbed it and they won't let go. They might lose their importance; they might lose their pull. Everywhere it's the same. Beware of the men you make your masters. Beware of the men you trust.We've only got to be clear-headed to sing the same song and play the same game all over the world, we common men. We don't want Power monkeyed with, we don't want Work and Goods monkeyed with, and, above all, we don't want Money monkeyed with. That's the elements of politics everywhere. When these things go wrong, we go wrong. That's how people begin to feel it and see it in America. That's how we feel it here -- when we look into our minds. That's what common people feel everywhere. That'swhat our brother whites -- "poor whites" they call them -- in those towns in South Carolina are fighting for now. Fighting our battle. Why aren't we with them? We speak the same language; we share the same blood. Who has been keeping us apart from them for a hundred and fifty-odd years? Ruling classes. Politicians. Dear old flag and all that stuff!Our school-books never tell us a word about the American common man; and his school-books never tell him a word about us. They flutter flags between us to keep us apart. Split us up for a century and a half because of some fuss about taxing tea. And what are our wonderful Labour and Socialist and Communist leaders doing to change that? What are they doing to unite us English-speaking common men together and give us our plain desire? Are they doing anything more for us than the land barons and thefactory barons and the money barons? Not a bit of it! These labour leaders of to-day mean to be lords to-morrow. They are just a fresh set of dishonest trustees. Look at these twenty-odd platforms here! Mark their needless contradictions! Their marvellous differences on minor issues. 'Manoeuvres!' 'Intrigue.' 'Personalities.' 'Monkeying.' 'Don't trust him, trust me!' All of them at it. Mark how we common men are distracted, how we are set hunting first after one red herring and then after another, for the want of simple, honest interpretation...
H.G.Wells
The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hundred and fifty years. Now we take it on. Our movement. The new wave of attack." "And fill a ditch in our turn," said Irwell. "Maybe we're over the last ditch," said Rud. "There must be a last ditch somewhere..."All other revolutionary movements have been experiments so far, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and more or less failures. They were experiments in liberation and they did not liberate. The old things wriggled back. But ours may be the experiment that succeeds. We may get to the Common-sense World State. Yes -- we -- in this room...Why not? It has to come somehow, somewhen... If it doesn't come pretty soon, there won't be much of humanity left to liberate.
H.G.Wells
But nowadays -- Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life out of Radicalism. It has never had the definite idealism of the Whigs and Liberals. 'Give us more employment and slightly higher pay and be sure of our contentment,' says Labour. 'We're loyal. We know our place. But we don't like being unemployed.' What good is that as Opposition? It's about as much opposition as a mewing cat. We mean more than that. I tell you frankly. Our task, I take it, my task, is to reinstate that practical working Opposition which has always been Old England's alternative line of defence... For the good of all of us...
H.G.Wells
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
Herman Melville
It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier ofinert leadership they constituted, between the discontented masses and constructive change. They seemed to be almost entirely preoccupied byinternecine intrigues and the "discipline of the Party". They were steeped in Party professionalism. They were not in any way traitors to their cause, or wilfully reactionary, but they had no minds for a renascent world. They meant nothing, but they did not know they meant nothing. They regarded Rud just as in their time they had regarded Liberalism, Fabianism, Communism, Science, suspecting them all, learning nothing from them, blankly resistant. They did not want ideas in politics. They just wanted to be the official representatives of organised labour and make what they could by it. Their manner betrayed their invincible resolution, as strong as an animal instinct, to play politics according to the rules, to manoeuvre for positions, to dig themselves into positions -- and squat...
H.G.Wells
He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. "It has become a series of empty forms," he said. "All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings.
H.G.Wells
We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That's different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world's affairs, and that's what we have to give them. I can't imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they've never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don't get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn't mean that the old isn't disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don'twait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can't walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him...
H.G.Wells
Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being 'just folk' was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it's no good for world affairs. Opening flower-shows and being genial to babies and all that is out of date. These parish politics methods have to go. The ultimate leader ought to be distant, audible but far off. Show yourself and then vanish into a cloud. Marx would never have counted for one tenth of his weight as 'Charlie Marx' playing chess with the boys, and Woodrow Wilson threw away all his magic as far as Europe was concerned when he crossed the Atlantic. Before he crossed he was a god -- what a god he was! After he arrived he was just a grinning guest. I've got to be the Common Man, yes, but not common like that.
H.G.Wells
You English," said Steenhold."You Americans," said Rud."When you aren't as fresh as paint," he said, "you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House -- they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting-lodge, and we'll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won't be in it.
H.G.Wells
These politicians impressed him as being the most shortsighted and sceptical men he had ever met. They lived in a little world that was bounded on the one side by "office" and on the other by the constituencies, and they seemed unable to imagine that it was not an eternal world. One tall man, he observed, in the year of grace 1941 was wearing a long frock-coat and a peculiar half-stiff collar reminiscent of that great parliamentary hand, Mr. Gladstone. They talked with one another about divisions; the government majority had dropped to twenty; and they talked about a scene in the House. The P.M.'s manners were becoming intolerable. Then with an air of relaxation they turned to Rud. The possibility of altering opinions in the constituencies seemed a very theoretical one to them. No doubt there were these waves of opinion in the country, and an intelligent parliamentary politician observed them and dodged about among them, but it was quite outside their technique to consider how the pressures of opinion could accumulate and be directed.
H.G.Wells
People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages!
Oliver Gaspirtz
Why is it that all individuals today, at least all who are socially conscious, are in one way or another tortured by social guilt? Because whatever they do is fatally false, falsified by the pressure of an utterly false society. If you live solely for individual contacts and personal service, then you betray your obligation to the suffering millions with whom you have no contact. If you live for economic or social and political action to cure the sick world, then, either you will be entirely ineffective, or else you will gain power, and so be corrupted by power; and then you will contribute to the burden of the institutionalism and mechanized tyranny that is turning all men into robots. If you withdraw from the world to purge your soul of the world’s poison, seeking a lone salvation in religious discipline and contemplation, then again you betray your immediate obligation to your fellows, even if you innocently suppose you will discover truth invaluable to a future generation. No! As I see it, do what you will, you are damned, just because you are all of a piece with a damned world, a damned species.
Olaf Stapledon
Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy.
Roland Huntford
A psychiatrist on the Baader-Meinhof gang: „They seek salvation in a paranoia that blinds them to reality, because they believe everything that surrounds them is an evil machination”. On this point they are not blind. Man cannot, however, look upon the underlying evil and thus cannot escape the punishment of total blindness and corruption meted out to all except inspired seers, and especially those athletes who have overcome evil and been immunized before approaching the vision. For Arjuna the sight of God in his terrifying aspect is cathartic; he remains a warrior and a righteous man. For a Baader, a glimpse behind the veil produces mental upheaval.
Ceronetti
If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is an understandable aversion to risk, and a reluctance to plan too far ahead: the modern electorate wants instant gratification and simplistic, populist solutions.
Mungo MacCallum
The family was serious about education; after dinner, Fred was known to issue volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to his children and guests for a little light reading.
Mungo MacCallum
Reminded that the Commonwealth was already involved in pre-school and university education, Chifley replied: “That’s different – they’re for kids before they’ve got souls and after they’ve lost them.
Mungo MacCallum
...the opportunity for overthrowing capitalism has passed – Labor governments are the hope of the world.” From that time his commitment to the ALP was unquestioned.
Mungo MacCallum
But perhaps his outstanding contribution to Australian politics was that, after a lifetime of switching sides, he put in place the basic two-party structure we have today: Labor versus anti-Labor. The anti-Labor parties have had many names, but always the same policy: to keep Labor out of office.
Mungo MacCallum
Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protests in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learn to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines . . . and occupied the financial districts. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed.
Micah White
Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar andperhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.
Alan W. Watts
Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight
Niccolò Machiavelli
It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself:This is not normal.Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass.Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address.And that is not normal.It is fucked up.
John Oliver
Andrei Yanuaryevich (one longs to blurt out, “Jaguaryevich”) Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute evidence-for evidence is always relative-or unchallengeable witnesses-for they can say different things at different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces” (in other words, the superiority of someone who has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up) “and on his character” (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty!)… In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.
Núria Añó
I grew up in Germany. Europe is far more liberal than America. Even most conservative right-wing parties over there are to the left of the US Democrats on many issues. For example, it wouldn't occur to even the most right-wing party in Europe to oppose universal healthcare. But this isn't a book about politics. It's about sex and drugs. You know, the good stuff.
Oliver Markus Malloy
In Germany, people will agree in theory that prostitution should be legal, but they usually won't admit that they themselves have ever gone to a prostitute: "Yeah, it should be legal, and I have no problem with it, but I would never go to one. I'm above that." Then they secretly go to one anyway. On the down low. They won't admit it in polite company, because they don't want to look trashy.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated—indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us—I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible—as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy...
Niccolò Machiavelli
...the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.
Alberto Manguel
A prince ought to have two fears one from within on account of his subjects the other from without on account of external powers. From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies and if he is well armed he will have good friends and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy and even should affairs outside be disturbed if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said as long as he does not despair he will resist every attack.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working-class were are on the wrong side of history - and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us.
Owen Jones
Today many of these selfish politicians are preying on the nation itself – (belching corruption and farting discontent!)
Faraaz Kazi
Politics is clearly a not so happening topic in our young blood. I could clearly see many students yawning. Some might have been discussing the new Shakira video amongst themselves, the one shown on MTV these days. Bloody donkeys, if it was a porno movie featuring an interracial orgy, their eyes might have ogled out and ears might have become sensitive to the oohs and aahs but not for causes of the nation. Hrmpf …youth power indeed!
Faraaz Kazi
Try to look at causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.
Eqbal Ahmed
...no one should marvel at the ease with which Alexander [the Great] kept possession of Asia, or at the difficulties which others, like Pyrrhus and many more, had in preserving their conquests. The difference does not arise from the greater or lesser ability of the conqueror, but from dissimilarities in the conquered lands.
Niccolò Machiavelli