Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.
The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.
Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.
Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle
Knowledge without Spirit is like finding yourself on a cold night with all the wood in the world and no flame to ignite it.
Believing that anxious thoughts and feelings can restore order to your life is like using a chain-saw to fold your laundry.
He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.
Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep.
I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams.
Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.
I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.
If you ask the government to impose morality, then moral questions will be decided by whoever has the most political power.
Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.
For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesnt begin at all.
I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.
I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.
Travel gives a character of experience to our knowledge, and brings the figures on the tablet of memory into strong relief.
The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope.
Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us.
I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.
Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.
I have been crying," she replied, simply, "and it has done me good. It helps a woman you know, just as swearing helps a man
You may loan your last dollar to a friend; but never loan him your axe, unless you are certain that he knows how to use it.
But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.
You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.
Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.
Love, the magician, knows this little trick whereby two people walk in different directions yet always remain side by side.
Love does not exclude; it embraces. If we don't love someone outside ourselves, then very simply, we do not love ourselves.
I always wanted Han Solo's confidence and swagger. My personality is way more C-3PO, but Han was always who I wanted to be.
I wished that I...had no savvy at all. No savvy to cause me heartache. No savvy to make me hope, and then leave me useless.
To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius-the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.
Tell of his wondrous faithfulness, And sound his power abroad; Sing the sweet promise of his grace, And the performing God.
For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.
If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.
Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is. Palestine is just the place for the world state headquarters.
There's no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It's all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.
Putting on the spectacles of science in expectation of finding an answer to everything looked at signifies inner blindness.
'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.