Quotes by Writers - Page 84

Why do people, when they are wrong, twist the conversation around and place the blame on someone else?
Hilary Grossman
It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions.
Alan W. Watts
... the love of money is the root of all evils." - John de Alençon, Pg, 64
The Medieval Murderers
the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.
Aldous Huxley
I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately i couldn't protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered.Live like a flower. You have that right. It's something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And it's enough.
Banana Yoshimoto
That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
In the cause of expedience and the quest for information, man has always been willing to trump his laws and betray his beliefs to legitimize the torture of those who do not share them.
Mark Allen Smith
Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me
Marquis de Sade
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are allborn, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death andmaking sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it.
Oli Anderson
Humans are mostly kind only to their own-self, and their own. To another being, they're mostly indifferent, if not inhumane.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Checked thoroughly, humans stink.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If you can cull an animal, or kill a human , and sleep well, does not mean you are any more well than a sick animal.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If your religion requires, as an article of faith, to hate people of other religions and faiths, you and your ism are screwed up, mate.
Fakeer Ishavardas
You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light. A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires . . . his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old, but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition. Emotions oppose the restrictions his fellow men lay upon him. Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked; guilt!
Roger Zelazny
There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.
George Savile Halifax
I've known humans, and I know beasts. The beast is better. It is unpretentious. It kills for food. Humans do 'cause they're just not any good.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Believe you me, I am all for you; and wish you well - for you to go to hell.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Humans are beasts, until tamed.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.
H.G.Wells
For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.
H.G.Wells
Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind.
Fakeer Ishavardas
In any event, we must remember that it's not the blinded wrongdoers who are primarily responsible for the triumph of evil in the world, but the spiritually sighted servants of the good.
Fyodor Stepun
It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world beyond the skins is actually an extension of our own bodies - and will end in destroying the very environment form which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends
Alan W. Watts
Frankly, the only good people who I know are dogs.
Fakeer Ishavardas
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
Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
Samuel Johnson
But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.
Emma Goldman
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A.S. Byatt
All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.
Alphonse Karr
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Do not wait for the tide to take you, my boy. Instead, you take on the tide
Ahmad Ardalan
Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.And then it's over.
Noah Hawley
I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
Why choose when you can have everything?
Ahmed Mostafa
We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Banana Yoshimoto
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
José Saramago
A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
Stanisław Lem
But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....
Rohinton Mistry
Unless we can interpret that ecstatic trip in a way that better grounds our physical reality, trance isn’t worth much.
S. Kelley Harrell
Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.
Loren Eiseley
The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.
Barbara Hall
Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered." (Bk2:8)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived..." (Bk2:3)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots.
Rudolf Rocker
In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.
Edmund Morris
Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.
Evgeny Morozov
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
Frederick Douglass
The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.
Benjamin Constant
When people say 'let's do something about it', they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.
Frank Chodorov
If political authority is not limited, the division of powers, ordinarily the guarantee of freedom, becomes a danger and a scourge.
Benjamin Constant
Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny.
Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue.
Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate, to his mind, its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness.
Frederick Douglass
What goes up, must come down." Well, Issac Newton's law doesn't apply to the internet. That's what people don't realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When you're a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, "For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Post a photograph and you'll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, you'll get a nostalgia rush and you'll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and you'll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.
Rebecca McNutt
The objective is to change the system and the behaviour it encourages, rather than replacing 'bad' people with 'good' people.
Owen Jones