Quotes by Writers - Page 161

It may be prodigious, but it's all Greek to me!
Hergé
Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.
Jean Shepherd
I don't do drugs. If I want a rush I just stand up when I'm not expecting it.
Dylan Moran
Why is it that when you wipe up dust its called dusting but when you wipe up a spill its not called spilling? Just something to think about.
Ellen DeGeneres
If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?
Steven Wright
Officer, I know I was going faster than 55MPH, but I wasn't going to be on theroad an hour.
Steven Wright
I got food poisoning today. I don't know when I'll use it.
Steven Wright
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions:Yes.Yes.No.One time in high school.Three times in my twenties.Rocks no salt.Yes.Four.Never. And how dare you!I will take no further questions.
Ellen DeGeneres
You set fire to my house, killed my family, and ate my dog. But steal my boyfriend? That's a step too far.
Libba Bray
I installed a skylight in my apartment...The people who live above me arefurious!
Steven Wright
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Charlie Brooker
When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving.
Steven Wright
Hermits have no peer pressure.
Steven Wright
I know because I read. Might I suggest you try it?
Libba Bray
If a word in the dictionary were mispelled, how would we know?
Steven Wright
The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready it goes on because it’s 11:30.
Lorne Michaels
That's so cute! They have birdbaths in the church!
Hilary Duff
When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year.I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.
Steven Wright
I spilled spot remover on my dog now he's gone.
Steven Wright
In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
Johnny Carson
I'd like to thank readers. Every time you open a book, it is a strike against ignorance. Unless you're reading Sarah Palin.
Libba Bray
Pleased to meet you." Sage said, offering his hand. "The pleasure is all mine," Rayna Purred. "Unless ofcourse, it's all Clea's which is even better."Sage smiled and might have even blushed a bit, which was highly entertaining.
Hilary Duff
I've had so many bikini waxes, I cry every time I see a Popsicle stick.
Libba Bray
The girl says "Oh uh-uh, wait a minute! Wait a minute! Just because I'm dressed this way does not make me a whore!" Which is true, Gentlemen, that is true. Just because they dress a certain way doesn't mean they are a certain way. Don't even forget it. But ladies, you must understand that is fucking confusing. It just is. Now that would be like me, Dave Chappelle, the comedian, walking down the street in a cop uniform. Somebody might run up on me saying, "Oh, thank God. Officer, help us! Come on. They're over here. Help us!" "Oh-hoh! Just because I'm dressed this way does not make me a police officer!" See what I mean? All right, ladies, fine. You are not a whore. But you are wearing a whore's uniform.
Dave Chappelle
What kind of person doesn't let you have gummi bears?
Libba Bray
My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
I wonder what will happen if i put a hand cream on my feet, will they get confused and start clapping?
Ellen DeGeneres
Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system.
Ellen DeGeneres
Hooray! Hooray! The end of the world has been postponed!
Hergé
If at first you don't succeed then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
Steven Wright
She's strong! And scary...I bet she's single...I'd put money on it..
Masashi Kishimoto
Accept who you are. Unless you're a serial killer.
Ellen DeGeneres
Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.
Banana Yoshimoto
We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually
Meša Selimović
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
Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man.” This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world’s leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent.
Algis Valiunas
In fact, science is neither materialist nor idealist; it is simply science. It’s impartial and can’t be answerable for the direction of its conclusions.
Valerian Pidmohylny
Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.
Daniel C. Dennett
That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Science is not a democracy. Therefore to try to pass of global warming as real just because "98% of scientists say they agree" makes no sense at all. If 98% of psychiatrists said that all mentally ill people needed lobotomized, does that make it true? If 98% of your friends jumped off a building, would you jump, too?
Rebecca McNutt
... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
Aldous Huxley
The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.(The Earth in Space and Time §1)
H.G.Wells
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.
Charles Fort
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer. But the spirit of the whole is processional. The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is dogmatic science. But they'll march! The little harlots will caper and the freaks will distract the attention and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the solidity of things which pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on coming, the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten, nor jeer, nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
Charles Fort
The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied.
Aldous Huxley
After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies.
H.G.Wells
Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things,’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce
Aldous Huxley
When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I’d tell her,” said Miss Pefko. “Now I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is—” Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly— “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.
Kurt Vonnegut
In relation to law I am doubtful whether, even at the present time, science has fairly begun.
H.G.Wells
Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.
Alan W. Watts
One day, scientists will overtake LIGHT and crash into the DARKNESS.
Paul McDermott
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
John Ruskin
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
Herman Melville
Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...
Raymond Tallis
It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.
Cyril Connolly
The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.
Aldous Huxley
Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me.
Olaf Stapledon
Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....
Aldous Huxley
Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe