User:Pariah/quotes

Some quotes gathered in my travels

General

• We are what we think, with our thoughts we make the world...----Siddhartha Gautama

• If only I was more human, I’d embrace every single feeling that gave me my life – "be Human," track 1 of be Human

• Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 67

• I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.----Albert Einstein

• I know good design when I fail to trip over it.----Jake, from Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson

• Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens----Jimi Hendrix

• Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.----Benjamin Franklin

• I have often regretted my speech, never my silence----Xenocrates

• The universe is change, life is opinion.----Marcus Aurelius, in The Meditations

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.----Henry David Thoreau in Walden

• Life ebbs as I speak: so seize each day, and grant the next no credit.----Horace

• When confronted with two paths, always take the harder one----Norbou, in Himalaya

• I intend to live forever, or die in the attempt----unknown

• Thank not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.----Socrates

• Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.----Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.----Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• I am not your autumn moon, I am the night----Audioslave, Like a Highway

• You don't know me from the wind, you never will, you never did----Leonard Cohen, The Future

• We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.----Winston Churchill

• If you treat an individual as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.----Goethe

• The world does not deal well with those who don't pick a side.---–Terry Pratchett

Dune

By Frank Herbert

• "...the mystery of life is not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."---Paul, quoting the Reverend Mother (p. 31)

• A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.----Paul, quoting the first law of the Mentat (p. 32)

• The guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.----page 472

• The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.----from Collected Sayings of Maud’Dib by the Princess Irulan, (p. 321)

• Deep in the human consciousness is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.----from “Collected Sayings of Maud’Dib” by the Princess Irulan, (p. 373)

• He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-sprit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence—into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations where removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference.----Paul, reflecting on spice dreams (p. 382)

• Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of religion to fit man into this lawfulness.----from the Orange Catholic Bible (Appendix II, p. 504)

• All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax.----from the Orange Catholic Bible (Appendix II, p. 505)

• Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.----Bomoko, Chairman of the C.E.T. (Commission of the Ecumenical Translators—who assembled the Orange Catholic Bible)

• “You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.”----Paul-Muad’Dib, quoting “Bomoko’s Legacy”—(P. 506, Appendix II)

• Mysticism isn’t difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility----Page 507, Appendix II

• Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality----From the O.C. Bible (P.506, Appendix II)

• Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in sealed flask. The human question is not of how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.--Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis (P. 493—Appendix 1)

• There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet... You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life—-all life—-is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.--Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis (P. 493—Appendix 1)

Dune Messiah

By Frank Herbert

• “Where is there substance in a universe composed of events? ... Is there a final answer? Doesn’t each solution produce new questions?”----Paul to Hayt / Duncan, p. 137

• “I’ve seen the oracle at work... I’ve seen those who seek signs and omens for their individual destiny. They fear what they seek.”---- Hayt / Duncan to Paul, p. 138

• “Men always fear things which move by themselves... You fear your own powers. Things fall into your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do they go?”----Hayt / Duncan to Paul, p. 138

• You do not beg the sun for mercy.---Maud’Dib’s travail, from The Stilgar Commentary (p. 141)

• There are many degrees of sight, and many degrees of blindness... What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?---Page 153, from the O.C. Bible

• The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other... behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy”---Addenda to Orders in Council, the Emperor Paul Muad’dib; page 201

• Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions, and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality. ----Jessica, in a letter to Alia, page 215

Callahan’s Secret

By Spider Robinson

• Sometimes a mocking voice whispers vile things in a man’s ear--things he can’t shut out because he half believes they’re true. But if you can personify that voice, and get him to fight it, to reject it...----Jake (narrating), page 42, The Blacksmith’s Tale

• I screwed my eyes so tight I saw neon paisley--Jake (narrating), page 43, The Blacksmith’s Tale)

• “Finn, you’ve been unable to love because you haven’t loved yourself because you haven’t loved us.”----Mary, page 43, The Blacksmith’s Tale.

• “Hell, Marty, Callahan’s been training us for years! Now we’ve got to start figuring it out for ourselves, that’s all. To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so it’s safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing.”----Jake, speaking to the gang, Page 170, Mick of Time

Trigun Anime Series

• “Everyone has a future”----Rem

Ender’s Game

By Orson Scott Card

• Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.----Page 94

Good Omens

By Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

• The small alien walked past the car. "CO2 level up 0.5 per cent," it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. "You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?"----Page 199

• Anathema, who had picked up witchcraft as she went along, disapproved of liquor in general, but approved of it in her specific case.----Page 211

• You see, it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.----Anathema to Newt, page 210

• Some of the old-style Satanists tended, in fact, to be quite nice people. They mouthed the words and went through the motions, just like the people they thought of as their opposite numbers, and then went home and lived lives of unassuming mediocrity for the rest of the week with never an unusually evil thought in their heads.----Page 84

• It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.----Page 87

• Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice. Various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.----Page 329

Spook Country

By William Gibson

• "Secrets," said the Bigend beside her, "are the very root of cool."----p. 106

• As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. There was nothing that wasn't God, and indeed how could there be?... And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn't yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case may be—rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he'd ever heard of.----pp 116-117

• "A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation."----pp. 136-137.

• "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" ... "If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."----p. 137.

• On the issue of torture (pp. 275-276):

— "I remember seeing proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we'd been sent unofficially, for comment," The old man said. "The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets." He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. "If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming." — "Did you interrogate people?" asked Garreth, the black Pelican case under his feet. — "It's an intimate process," the old man said. "Entirely about intimacy." He spread his hand, held it, as if above an invisible flame. "An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear." He lowered his hand. "And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will." He tapped the folded paper. "When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they'd turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials." He fell silent. — Tito heard the lapping of waves. — This was still America, they said.

Green Mars

By Kim Stanley Robinson

• In archetypal terminologies we might call green and white the Mystic and the Scientist. Both extremely powerful figures, as you see. But what we need, if you ask me, is a combination of the two, which we call the Alchemist. --P.15

• One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large...-- P.80

• He concluded that strictly speaking, there was no such thing as altruism. It was only selfishness taking the long view, acknowledging the real costs of behaviour and making sure to pay them in order not to run up any long-term debts.-- P.84

• Our disagreement is another facet of what people call the fact-value problem. Science concerns itself with facts, and with theories that turn facts into examples. Values are another kind of system, a human construct.-- P.144

• …human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis… -- P.220

• …“Survival of the fittest,” which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order… -- P.192

• What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it. -- P.235

• Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.-- P.235

• …the powerful almost always seem to have a dysfunctional aspect to them. Everything from cynicism to full-blown destructiveness. They’re not happy.-- P.236

• Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly.-- P.291

• But all the good plans are crazy, aren’t they.-- P.312

• Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.-- P.315

• “You are on your tariqat,” Dhu el-Nun said to Nirgal. This was one’s spiritual path, he explained, one’s road to reality. Nirgal nodded, struck by the aptness of the description—it was just how his life had always felt to him. “You must feel lucky,” Dhu said. “You must pay attention.”-- P.334

• What we need is equality without conformity-- P.338

• …most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.-- P.370

• Generational transmission of information always contained a lot of error; that was how evolution happened.-- P.388

• The truth is not a very good lover.-- P.402

• We have to assume our past, you see? We have to make it a part of what we are now, by an act of the imagination. It’s a creative thing, an active thing. -- P.438

• You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.-- P.440

• But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.-- P.448

• …it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.-- P.520

• …you only put your full effort into a thing when there is no going back.-- P. 622

The Amber novels

By Roger Zelazny

• I usually do my best real thinking when I’m thinking about something else.--P. 25, Nine Princes in Amber

• The forces that shape the universe fell upon me and beat me into their image.-—P.91, Nine Princes in Amber

• I sought out the kitchen and conned a hearty breakfast. Well, it was really around lunchtime, but let’s call things by their proper names.--P.23, Guns of Avalon

• “Perhaps,” I said. “Most things depend on other things. This thing is no different.”--P.58, Sign of the Unicorn

The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World

By Harry Harrison

• Of all the varied forms of crime, bank robbery is the most satisfactory to both the individual and society. The individual of course gets a lot of money, that goes without saying, and he benefits society by putting large amounts of cash back into circulation. The economy is stimulated, small businessmen prosper, people read about the crime with great interest, and the police have a chance to exercise their various skills. Good for all. Though I have heard foolish people complain it hurts the bank. This is arrant nonsense. All banks are insured, so they lose nothing, while the sums involved are miniscule in the overall operation of the insuring firm, where the most that might happen is that a microscopically smaller dividend will be paid at the end of the year. Little enough price to pay for all the good caused.--P. 36

• It became obvious why these temporal criminals chose this particular epoch [the 20th century]. A society just bursting into the age of technology, yet the people still with their minds in the dark ages.--P. 72

The Culture novels

By Iain M. Banks

• Beyond a certain point, there was simply nothing you could do; there was no brilliant plan you could draw up or cunning stratagem you could employ that would not seem laughably simple and unsophisticated to a profoundly more developed enemy.--P. 18, Excession

• That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome. It was the problem that Subliming [ascending to a higher plane of being] dispensed with, of course, and it was one of the (usually more minor) reasons that civilisations chose Elderhood; if your course was set in that direction in the first place then eventually that reliance on the material universe came to seem vestigial, untidy, pointless, and even embarrassing.--P. 141, Excession

• Make your inquiries if you must, but frankly I think it is this constant urge to inquire that causes you such pain; when one is able to scrutinise a subject as closely as we are – and to do so with the cross-referential capacity we possess, then the closer one looks into anything the more coincidences one finds, perfectly innocent though they may be.--P. 161, Excession

• … his head felt as if it was spinning, then he stopped; there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.--P. 172, Excession

• He’d wondered then if he’d made a terrible mistake. One part of his mind was convinced he had, another part claimed the moral high ground of maturity and assured him it was the smartest move he’d ever made, that he was indeed finally growing up. He had decided that night that even if it was a mistake that was just too bad; it was a mistake that could only be dealt with by embracing it, by grasping it with both hands and accepting the results of his decision…--P.336, Excession

• Some people reckoned to live riskier and therefore more interesting lives because they did back up a recorded mind-state every so often, while other people…believed that you were more likely to live your life that bit more vividly when you knew this was your one and only chance at it.--P.427, Excession

• “…Sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them…”--Look to Windward