DileepReddy

(Needed a place to dump them)

• “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.” - Thea von Harbou, Epigram from “Metropolis” (silent film)
• “Let a person walk alone with few wishes, committing no wrong, like an Elephant in the forest.” - Siddhartha Gauthama ’Buddha’
• “Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.” - Philip K. Dick
• “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner
• “The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation.” - Henry David Thoreau
• “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” - G. K. Chesterton
• “Apparently it is wrong, when finding carol singers at your door, to yell ‘Hail Satan! See you in Disneyland!’ and slam it on them. But I don’t want to be right.” - Warren Ellis
• “Great are the Stars, and Man is of no account to them.” - Olaf Stapledon, from “Last and First Men” (novel)
• “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by the means of language.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “…even these crimson hands thou sever’st from my valiant arms shall yield a thousand fold – for when the earth hath drunk my blood, an iron harvest she shall yield, of hostile hands to enslave and bind thine own.” - Galvarino (Spanish given name), Mapuche Indian Warrior
• “The Night, once the font of the Unknown, becomes only the lack of the Sun.” - The Trickster’s Lament, from “Thief” (videogame)
• “It’s a good thing I like human comedy, because there’s been plenty of it to appreciate.” - John Perry Barlow, Founder of EFF
• “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” - Mae West
• “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” - Anton Chekhov
• “All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” - Chuck Palahniuk
• “We look at the world through eyes of ancient mud.” - John Gray
• “Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states.” - Hans J. Morgenthau
• “I dare not belittle you. You will all become Buddhas.” *- Passage from the Lotus Sutra, chanted as a prayer for the benefit of all sentient beings*
• “The superior man thinks of evil that will come and guards against it.” - The Book of Changes
• “Against stupidity, the very gods themselves content in vain.” - Friedrich Schiller
• “For once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” - Leonardo Da Vinci
• “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
• “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” - Samuel Johnson
• “Living well is the best revenge.” - George Herbert
• “To ravage, to slaughter; to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” - Publius Tacitus
• “There is an all-out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated and written by individuals.” - Christopher Hitchens
• “If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.” - Louis D. Brandeis
• “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” - Plato, on the written word
• “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.” - Robert A. Heinlein
• “You can wax, exfoliate, and paint yourself into a statue of a goddess, we don’t care. Because there’s a girl standing over there, on the bridge, staring at the horizon like she’s a thousand miles away, singing a dark, and beautiful song for its own sake. And now you will never win. Because you will never have that. You will never DO, that.” - Doctor Randomercam
• “All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” - Niccolò Machiavelli
• “… a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may bring about the end of a personal despotism or of avaricious tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform of modes of thought. New prejudices will serve, in place of the old, as guidelines for the unthinking multitude.” - Immanuel Kant
• “Soon we will search in the margins of your history, in distant countries, for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves: Was Andalusia here or there? On the land … or in the poem?” - Mahmoud Darwish
• “Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.” - Henry James
• “The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
• “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” - George Orwell
• “Satire and comedy both make use of the comic contradiction, but their aims are different. Satire would arouse in readers the desire to act so that contradictions disappear; comedy would persuade them to accept the contradictions in good humor as facts against which it is useless to rebel.” - W. H. Auden
• “But thou wilt never find him who would be quite qualified to mock at thee, the individual, at thy best, who could bring home to thy conscience its limitless, buzzing and croaking wretchedness so as to be in accord with truth. To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the veriest truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
• “Great men are almost always bad men, …” - Lord Acton
• “After us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold. They will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms, the loveliest of women. And they will forget that they owe these things, to us.” - Genghis Khan
• “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists–that is why they invented hell.” - Bertrand Russell
• “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur
• “We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.” - Phillip Pullman