Quotes by Writers - Page 85

I would like Britain - and indeed other countries - to be run in the interests of people's needs and aspirations, rather than on the basis of profit for a small elite; for democracy to be democratically managed by working people; for democracy to be extended as far as possible, including in the workplace and the economy.
Owen Jones
Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any par­ticular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a neg­ligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the peo­ple, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey.
Aldous Huxley
When we think of readapting mankind to a world of unity and co-operation, we have to consider that practically all the educational machinery on earth, is still in the hands of God-selling or Marx-selling combines. Everywhere in close co-operation with our nationalist governments, the oil and steel interests, our drug salesmanship, and so forth, the hirelines of these huge religious concerns, with more or less zeal and loyalty, are selling destruction to mankind.
H.G.Wells
Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong
Voltaire
A government of laws, and not of men
John Adams
Only the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives.
Aldous Huxley
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
John Adams
We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
Olaf Stapledon
Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.
Benjamin Constant
Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?
George Sand
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution
Aldous Huxley
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occup
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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 good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.
Rebecca Goldstein
I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.
Rebecca Goldstein
If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.
H.G.Wells
The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control.
Oli Anderson
We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough
Noah Hawley
One's ugly face and features may not be a problem. Conversely, one's such character displays, well a problem since no one tolerates it.
Ehsan Sehgal
There was a touch of prairie about the fellow.--hans vollmanYes.--roger bevins iiiLike stepping into a summer barn late at night.--hans vollmanOr a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns.--roger bevins iiiVast. Windswept. New. Sad.--hans vollmanSpacious. Curious. Doom-minded. Ambitious.--roger bevins iiiBack slightly out.--hans vollmanRight boot chafing.--roger bevins iii
George Saunders
One's character is key to its fate and future of life that how one executes and prosecutes it.
Ehsan Sehgal
These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
Abigail Adams
Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Charles de Gaulle
I wonder if I could take back every 'I love you' ever said to you, would I do it?
Faraaz Kazi
To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.
Banana Yoshimoto
Love doesn't go away just because you realize you can't be with someone
Lexi Ryan
I wished my heart would break and get it over with.
Banana Yoshimoto
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the time for him to leave was approaching:"Oh!", said the fox. "I am going to cry.""It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any harm; but you wanted me to tame you...""I know," said the fox."And now you're going to cry!" said the little prince."I know," said the fox."So you have gained nothing from it at all!""Yes, I have gained something," said the fox, "because of the colour of the corn.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Each heartbreak is a little death, all the same.
Petina Gappah
You can't be the cause and the cure, mon amour.
Ahmed Mostafa
It's no use crying over spilt milkWhat’s done, is done.
James Howell
People May Hate You For Being Different and Not Living By Society's Standards,but Deep Down,They Wish They Had The Courage To Do The Same.
Kevin Hart
Hero is he alone who vies with powers supreme!
Wu Cheng'en
There is no playing safe with me any longer. I only take huge risks. I know this means I can lose big time, but so long as there is a chance that I will win big time, I will take it
Sahndra Fon Dufe
Memories help make us who we are.(Taken from novel...A Very English Affair)
Faith Mortimer
Shukhov had been told that this old man'd been in camps and prisons more years than you could count and had never come under any amnesty. When one ten-year stretch was over they slapped on another. Shukhov took a good look at him close up. In the camp you could pick him out among all the men with their bent backs because he was straight as a ramrod. When he sat at the table it looked like he was sitting on something to raise himself up higher. There hadn't been anything to shave off his head for a long time-he'd lost all his hair because of the good life. His eyes didn't shift around the mess hall all the time to see what was going on, and he was staring over Shukhov's head and looking at something nobody else could see. He ate his thin gruel with a worn old wooden spoon, and he took his time. He didn't bend down low over the bowl like all the others did, but brought the spoon up to his mouth. He didn't have a single tooth either top or bottom-he chewed the bread with his hard gums like they were teeth. His face was all worn-out but not like a goner's-it was dark and looked like it had been hewed out of stone. And you could tell from his big rough hands with the dirt worked in them he hadn't spent many of his long years doing any of the soft jobs. You could see his mind was set on one thing-never to give in. He didn't put his eight ounces of bread in all the filth on the table like everybody else but laid it on a clean little piece of rag that'd been washed over and over again.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.
Oliver Burkeman
Alone within the vast tribunal that is the stormy sky, the pilot is in contention for his mailbags with three elemental divinities: mountain, sea and storm.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting
Elizabeth Bibesco
When undesirable and ugly addendum enters a man's life history, it become acceptable as part of the process of growing up.
Aihebholo-oria Okonoboh
Expect the unexpected, my mother once said. Because the unexpected most certainly will be expecting you.
Marjorie M. Liu
I'm sorry, but I don't get it. If we're supposed to ignore everything that's wrong with our lives, then I can't see how we'll ever make things right.
A.S. King
Yes. Knock and it shall be opened to you. The gift of wisdom can be found, if one wishes to search for it, and is willing to be altered by it. It is not a gift given without cost or transformation, nor one to be used lightly.
Faith Hunter
As children play games with imaginary things, initially a seeker indulges in little things. So simple people believe in simple things.
Fakeer Ishavardas
No book dropped from "up there". If it did, you say, then something is screwed up somewhere between your neck, and the top of your head.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Even the Master, in one way or another, is a student throughout life.
Fakeer Ishavardas
For the being, maybe. But for the spirit, there are no quick sands.
Fakeer Ishavardas