| # | Quote | Links |
|---|
| 101 | Every American... lives in the finest town in the finest county in the finest state in the finest country in the world - and each one of them believe it. And that is what makes America a great country and is going to keep her so. | |
| 102 | Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries... | |
| 103 | Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. | |
| 104 | Everyone, to one extent or another, must face life’s trials. There will always be those who try to influence or even dominate us. We cannot allow such things to be an excuse for making the wrong choices. Ultimately, each of us lives our own life and we are responsible for it. | |
| 105 | Evil grants no mercy, and to attempt to appease it is nothing more than a piecemeal surrender to it. Surrender to evil is slavery at best, death at worst. Thus, your unconditional rejection of violence is really nothing more than embracing death as preferable to life. You will achieve what you embrace. | |
| 106 | Expectations are a funny thing. When you're born with them, you resent them, fight against them. When you've never been given any, you feel the lack of them your whole life. | |
| 107 | Facing facts is definitely preferable to facing defeat. | |
| 108 | Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. | |
| 109 | Few people, even clerical types, really believed in evil anymore, which was one reason evil kept winning. | |
| 110 | First Lady Michelle Obama has been at the forefront of this effort, the country's self-anointed First Parent. | |
| 111 | First, it is a mistake to presume to know anyone's internal emotional landscape based on what external emotional signals they seem to be sending. Second, you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that. | |
| 112 | Folks are always talking about how busy a bee is, shows they never really watched a bee. A bee makes so much fuss with all his perambulating around that folks think they're doing a sight of work, but believe me, I've watched bees by the hour and I can tell you all that buzzing is a big fraud. The bees I've watched always buzzed in the sunniest places around the best-smelling flowers, just loafing their heads off lusting around in the play of sun and shadow at the swamp's edge. Busy? Not so's you could notice. | |
| 113 | Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they've missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I've ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one. | |
| 114 | For this 'honor' that thou dost hold dear, this 'face' thou speakest of , is most truly but thine own opinion of thyself. We commonly suppose that 'tis what others think of us, but 'tis not so. 'Tis simply that most of us have so little regard for ourselves, that we believe others opinions of us to be more important than our own. Therefore have we the need to save our countenances - our 'faces,' which term means only what others see of us. Yet we know that only by what they say they think of us - so our 'faces,' when all is truly said, are others' opinions of us. We feel we must demand others' respect, or we cannot respect ourselves. | |
| 115 | For, you see, the most important truths can always withstand a little examination. | |
| 116 | Freedom must be won, but then it has to be guarded... | |
| 117 | From all I have seen and heard, a wedding is not the magic charm we think it. A priest's blessing, and an exchange of rings, will not make a wild boy instantly into a prudent husband, nor transform a flirtatious lass at once into a demure and loyal wife. And, assuredly, a wedding will not make two folk who are unsuited to fall in Iove. | |
| 118 | From what I've seen in life, a man who preaches a better way at the cost of the truth is a man who wants nothing more than for himself to be the master and you the slave. | |
| 119 | Generosity is fine, if it's by your free choice, but a belief in the primacy of self-sacrifice as a moral requisite is nothing less than the sanctioning of slavery. Those who tell you that it is your responsibility and duty to sacrifice are trying to blind you to the chains they are slipping around your neck. | |
| 120 | Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage. | |
| 121 | Gold is never a simple thing. Many a man has wished he had gold, but once he his it he finds trouble. Gold causes folks to lose their right thinking and their common sense. | |
| 122 | Good. Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent. | |
| 123 | Government is tyranny. At its best it is dressed in pretty colours. | |
| 124 | Granny subsided into unaccustomed, troubled silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theater worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn't belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. | |
| 125 | Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge. | |
| 126 | He decided he'd rather die as a fundamentally decent human being than live as the sort of asshole who'd tear out someone's liver to get into an escape pod. | |
| 127 | He didn't even understand why there needed to be new laws all the time. After all, right was right, and wrong was wrong. | |
| 128 | He fancied himself as a tough man and a gunfighter, but he didn't really want anybody shooting at him. The trouble with having a reputation as a tough man is that the time always comes when you have to be a tough man. | |
| 129 | He found it odd how folk grew further apart when there were more of them and less distance between them. Perhaps there was so much going on around them that they shut it all out to get on with daily business. | |
| 130 | He had a notion time paradoxes were better in light doses. | |
| 131 | He is a worthy enemy - but that's just to say, he would not be worthy an he were not able; but he would not be an enemy were he not evil. | |
| 132 | Heck, our kids aren't even safe in places where, in my day (I'm 48), safety was 99.9% given. What places am I referring to? I'm talking about schools and churches. Those two institutions, especially our schools, have pretty much gone down the crapper as far as being a safe haven for our kids because gun-wielding cretins have figured out that gun-free zones are opportunity-rich environments for them to carry out their dirty deeds. | |
| 133 | His face might have been fresh, but his ideas were not; tyranny was ancient, even if Neal deluded himself in believing it the bright new salvation of mankind when applied by him and his fellows. | |
| 134 | His gambit is obvious, of course.... If he can create a great deal of public furor over the more undesirable aspects of popular culture, he can distract the citizenry to the point at which they will become so involved in debating freedom to blast out sound and massacre lyric verse, that they will ignore the duller and more wearisome aspects the actions of the Assembly. | |
| 135 | History is not made only by kings and parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger, thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow. In meriting my stories I have found myself looking back again and again to origins, to find and clearly see the ancestors of the pioneers. | |
| 136 | Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be. | |
| 137 | Hope is not a strategy. | |
| 138 | How am I supposed to know anything about the contrast between the precise language of the law and the twists and turns of people's minds that could bend it out of its original purpose? | |
| 139 | How can one foresee, without first remembering? | |
| 140 | How much can a man endure? How long could a man continue? These things I asked myself, for I am a questioning man, yet even as I asked the answers were there before me. If he be a man indeed, he must always go on, he must always endure. Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it is also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches... these things, too, are gone. | |
| 141 | How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things. | |
| 142 | Human life is sacred, diff and apim alike. These were deluded people; yes, they had betrayed good folk to terrible fates; but vengeance for the sake of vengeance destroys him who so callously metes out retribution without thought of the deeper motivations. | |
| 143 | Humans have historically distrusted and disliked one another to the point of murder and war over such minor differences as religion, color, language, and the like. That's one rationale Master System had for keeping each colonial world a homogenous race and culture. Yet my children could never truly comprehend why a Crow or a Sioux or a Cheyenne - or a Janipurian or a Chanchukian or even an Alititian - should be judged in any way but by what kind of people they are. But such things have always worked on a small scale, Nagy, particularly when we are crisis-driven or bound together by mutual self-interest, but never in the mass. That is our tragedy. Never in the mass.
| |
| 144 | I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. | |
| 145 | I can never fully believe or trust you... not after the lies you have told. That is the curse of lying..... Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time. | |
| 146 | I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. | |
| 147 | I distrust anyone who wants to ban something "for the good of the public." | |
| 148 | I don’t think it matters what age you are when you figure it out... I think the important thing is to figure it out before someone else tells you what you want to be, and they get it wrong. | |
| 149 | I don't insist on economical one-shot kills. I'm willing to waste a little ammunition to insure that the other guy gets dead and I stay alive. | |
| 150 | I don't like people who think tolerance is a one-way street. | |