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| 101 | 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. | |
| 102 | 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. | |
| 103 | Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be. | |
| 104 | Hope is not a strategy. | |
| 105 | How can one foresee, without first remembering? | |
| 106 | How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things. | |
| 107 | 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. | |
| 108 | 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.
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| 109 | 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. | |
| 110 | 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. | |
| 111 | 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. | |
| 112 | I distrust anyone who wants to ban something "for the good of the public." | |
| 113 | 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. | |
| 114 | I enjoy things with curious properties, and stupidity is most interesting. The more you study it, the further it flees - and yet the more of it you obtain, the less you understand about it! | |
| 115 | I found out later that that was a loaded question. The straight answer was that there are a lot of people in show business who never stop to ask themselves what they're doing to their audience. Some of 'em don't give a damn, as long as they make money. Some of them care a lot, but have very different ideas from mine about what's good for the folks out there in the dark. Most of 'em laugh at the idea that a show can have any effect on people. I guess they're the ones who really think the argument over censorship is silly.
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| 116 | I had... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data. | |
| 117 | I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. | |
| 118 | I hereby confess to writing deathless prose, on occasion - and even immortal verse, now and then. But when I do, I do it alone, with only a split of vin ordinaire for company, and I do it for me, myself, only. It's pure self-indulgence, of course - 'art for art's sake' really means 'art for the artist's sake.' It's the sheer personal gratification of doing something as well as I can possibly do it, of expressing my feelings, my view of existence, my self - and it's for me, alone. Oh, I don't mind if other people read it, and it's nice if they like it. Sure, I enjoy praise; I'm human, too. But that's just a by-product, a side issue.... This - this is another matter. It's another thing entirely. This script, I wrote for other people, and I make it with a host of other people. If no one else ever hears it or sees it, it will have failed. Worse: it'll be absurd, without purpose. Without an audience, it's incomplete. | |
| 119 | I know - every educated man should be a critic... and if you're not willing to learn, you have no right to criticize. | |
| 120 | I know, I know. But they’ll solve them. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. | |
| 121 | I mean only, when boys are cowed by abusive authority, Ritalined out of their brains or indoctrinated to believe this God-given behavior is bad that they turn into the followers, the veritable sheeples of stupid cultural morays, folding to high pressure peers and ideological {+ bullshit}. | |
| 122 | I might point out to you that no wise man tells all he knows. And that he who carries tales has little else in his head. | |
| 123 | I never understood how galling it was. Some smug bastard with a ledger comes into town, makes you pay for the privilege of owning something. | |
| 124 | I swear, the more you give a man, the more he demands, and the less happy he becomes. | |
| 125 | I think we should let our children be children. Let them be innocent and enjoy their grade school years. There will be enough pressure on them as they get older... | |
| 126 | I yet dream of a union in which husband and wife are so firmly delighted in one another that they act in concert, and take so much pleasure in one another's company that the bondage of never doing what one wishes, but ever tempering thine own desires by another's whims, seems of little moment. | |
| 127 | I'd been feeling sorry for myself, which is about the most useless thing you can feel: it doesn't do a damned thing for you. You don't feel any better, you don't get any better, and you're too busy moping to do anything to actually make your life any better. | |
| 128 | If a man can find dry wood after three days of rain he's a man to ride the river with. | |
| 129 | If an idea was sound, it had to have a life beyond a leader, or the leader had failed. | |
| 130 | If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing. | |
| 131 | If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives, then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls. You think their ways are wrong. They think you are dinner. | |
| 132 | If you perpetuate the dreams of the past, then you stifle your own dreams of the future. | |
| 133 | If you think you're a slave, then you are a slave... | |
| 134 | If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking for others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so. | |
| 135 | If, in war, you're not willing to die for your cause but your enemy is willing to die for his, a terrible weight has been set on one side of the scales. | |
| 136 | I'm not a professional educator, of course, but maybe if the school system would stop teaching third-graders how to have sex, they wouldn't have so big a problem. | |
| 137 | I'm sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really it's mostly for their own good. | |
| 138 | In a manner of speaking you hide behind women's skirts as you shoot arrows so that when arrows come back at you, you can feign outrage at an atrocity. | |
| 139 | In other words, the only legal hoe is a union hoe. | |
| 140 | In the end words are just wind. | |
| 141 | In this age of social networking, privacy is becoming an ancient relic. Lives can be changed by the posting of a single photo or profile update. And in the case of Tyler, lives can be lost in 140 characters or less. | |
| 142 | In trade between willing parties who share moral values and who deal fairly and honestly with one another, compromise over something like price is legitimate. In matters of morality or truth, there can be no compromise. | |
| 143 | It ain’t ever as simple, is it, as a man is just good or bad? Not even you. Not even Bethod. Not anybody. | |
| 144 | It frightens me... because we all see the world by some kind of light personal to us, and that light changes our perception. I don't see clearly. I want to, but I don't know if I ever truly can. | |
| 145 | It gets tiresome being spoken to as if you are a child, even if you happen to be one. | |
| 146 | It has been my experience that most problems in life are caused by a lack of information. Many people just don’t know the things they need to know. Some ignore the truth; others never understand it. | |
| 147 | It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. | |
| 148 | It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It doesn’t matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip). This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their lives have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so after fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop up all their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psychophysiologically unstable. | |
| 149 | It is good to know well a man you are going to kill; it is not good to understand him. | |
| 150 | It is illogical, you see, to have a law which says 'guns are forbidden' when no one to whom the law applies is permitted to know the meaning of the word. Far more orderly to dispense with the concept altogether. At the moment, they withhold only the objects, and information. But it is only logical that they should also try to withhold ideas. You cannot control knowledge without controlling discovery, and you cannot control discovery without controlling thought, and when you control thought... do you see what I'm getting at... | |