One truth is clear: whatever is, is right.
- Alexander Pope

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
- Oscar Wilde

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

All great truth's begin as blasphemies.
- Bernard Shaw

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.
- Farley Mowat

It is a hard thing to speak the truth. It is difficult to make hidden forces appear.
- Horqarnoq (Inuit Shaman)

There is nothing to amazing to be true.
- Alan Spragetti

Truth: lie's lie.
- Nicholas Cotanoy

Every dogma has it's day.
- Abraham Rotein

The truth can hurt: be careful with it.
- Anonymous

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
- Anonymous

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
- Josh Billings

Truth may be blamed but can not be shamed.
- English proverb

To deceive a deceiver is no deceit
- English proverb

We are never deceived, we deceive ourselves.
- Goethe

The truth? No, by nature man is more afraid of the truth than of death -- and that is perfectly natural: for the truth is even more repugnant than death to man's natural being. What wonder, then, that he is so afraid of it? . . . For man is a social animal -- only in the herd is he happy. It is all one to him whether it is the profoundest nonsense or the greatest villainy -- he feels completely at ease with it, so long as it is the view of the herd or the actions of the herd and he is able to join the herd.
- Soren Kierkegaard

If you gaze for long into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.
- Nietzsche

When you look into the abyss, you wonder what you see . . . I wonder that the abyss sees when it looks back.
- Rhodan

If you believe, no proof is necessary; if you doubt, no proof is sufficient.
- Kenneth Woodward

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
- Stalin

Kill one person, you're a murderer; kill a million people, you're a conqueror; kill everybody, you're god.
- Anonymous

She took rejection well -- she ignored it.
- Glen Cook, "The Garrett Files"

The appearance of sincerity counts for more than actual truthfulness.
- Glen Cook, "The Garrett Files"

Open sincerity is harder to bear than friendly laughter.
- Aspin, "Mything Persons"

The question is the answer -- the question is always the answer.
- Barbara Hambly

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
- Napoleon

A person can only feel alone if he has never gotten to know himself.
- Anthropos

To fail to accept the unalterable is insane; to fail to change the intolerable is criminal. You must train yourself to distinguish between them.
- Anthropos

Guilt is a tempting trap for the unwary. It lets you feign responsibility while wallowing in ego.
- Anthropos

The best morality boils down to a simple respect for others.
- Anthropos

If you can't achieve perfection in yourself, how can you expect it in others?
- Anthropos

You can measure the immaturity of a people by the thickness of their law books.
- Anthropos

An open door may tempt a saint.
- English proverb

I hope, for His sake, that God does not exist -- because if He does, He has an awful lot to answer for.
- Phillip K. Dirk

No answer is also an answer.
- Danish Proverb

Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
- George Bernard Shaw

Faith - belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, of things without parallel.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

We have no rights, only responsibilities.
- Nicholas Monserrat, "The Time Before This"

Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.        
- Democritus

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will crush you.
- Nikita Khruschev

We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but their is no one else.
- Lyndon B. Johnson

A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.
- Thomas Paine

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
- John Curron

To die we can bear -- but to serve we disdain
For shame is too freemen more dreadful than pain.
- John Dickenson

The measure of a man's true character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
- T. Macaulay

When you come to the edge of all that you know, and are about to step off into the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something sold beneath to stand on or you will be taught to fly.
- Barbara J. Winter

Worry is an abuse of God's gift of imagination.
- Unknown

If you have one true friend, you have more than your share.
- Unknown

That fire liberty . . . which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish.
- James Garfeild

No man loveth his fetters, be they made of gold.
- John Heywood

If you want happiness . . .
For an hour -- take a nap
For a day -- go fishing
For a month -- get married
For a year -- inherit a fortune
For a lifetime -- help someone else
- Chinese Proverb

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or god only a blunder of man?
- Nietzsche

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
- Joan D Vinge, "Psion"

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.
- W.B. Yeats

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Anonymous

Even in heave they don't sing all the time.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'Pictures of a Gone World"

History -- the distillation of rumour.
- Thomas Carlyle

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.
- Kris Kristofferson

. . . Necessity and chance
Approach me not, and what I will is fate.
- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
- Emily Dickinson

Character is what you are in the dark.
- Earl MacRouch

In the strict sense, a perfect democracy has never existed and never will. It is against nature that the many shall govern and the few be governed.
- Rosseau

If their existed a nation of Gods, it would rule itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to mankind.
- Rosseau

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
- George Bernard Shaw

The end is where we start from.
- T.S. Elliot, "Little Gidding"

In every parting there is an image of death.
- George Elliot

. . . there was a way to hell, even from the gates of Heaven.
- John Bunyan

Democracy seems suitable only to a very little country.
- Voltaire

The love of liberty, with life is given,
and life itself the inferior gift of Heaven.
- John Dryden

For what avail the plow or sail,
Or land, of life, if freedom fail?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

By nature men are nearly all alike; by practise they get to be wide apart.
- Confucius

The balance [scale] distinguisheth not between gold and lead.
- George Herbert

I've a grand memory for forgetting.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

All men, among themselves, are by nature equal. the inequality we now discern hath its spring from civil law.
- Hobbes

O, fortune!
Like the moon
ever changing,
rising first,
then declining.
- Carl Orff

Dread destiny and empty fate, an ever turning wheel.
- Carl Orff

The wheel of fortune turns, dishonoured, I fall from grace.
- Carl Orff

And since by fate the strong are overthrown, weep ye all with me!
- Carl Orff

. . . Now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered, -- wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be. . . .
- John Milton, 'Paradise Lost"

Men are by nature neither kings nor grandes, nor courtiers, nor millionaires; all are born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to chargins, evil, needs, and sorrows of every sort, and finally all are condemned to death.
- Rousseau

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end, it is itself the highest political end.
- Lord Acton

. . . the lion does not defend him self against traps, and the fox does not defend himself against wolves.
- Machiavelli, "The Prince"

Liberty: one of imaginations most precious possessions.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Cevil's Dictionary"

Build them the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.
And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.
- D.H. Lawrence, "The Ship of Death"

The human race, such as it is, can not subsist unless their is an infinity of useful men who possess nothing at all; for it is certain that a man who is well off will not leave his own land to come to till yours . . . Equality, therefore, is at once most natural and most fantastic.
- Voltaire

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
- Thomas Jefferson

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot exist.
- Edmund Burke

The deep, unutterable woe
Which none save exiles feel.
- W.E. Ayton

. . . upon the sea of death, where we still sail darkly, for we can not steer and have no port.
- D.H. Lawrence, "The Ship of Death"

Where all life dies, death lives.
- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

But say I could repent, and could obtain,
By act of grace my former state; how soon
Would height recall high thoughts, how soon unsay
What false submission swore; ease would recant
Vows made in pain, as violent and void --
For never can true reconcilement grow
Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deed --
Which would but lead me to a worse relapse
And heavier fall. . . .
- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

It is a great and dangerous error to assume that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike . . . not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.
- John C. Calhoun

Those that fight for freedom undertake
The noblest cause mankind can have at stake.
- William Cowper

Married past redemption.
- John Dryden

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

Thou hast not half the power to do me harm,
As I have to be hurt.
- Shakespeare, "Othello"

Giving honour unto the wife, as unto a weaker vessel.
- Bible (Peter 3:7)

With the dead, there is no rivalry.
- T. Macaulay

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
- Oscar Wilde

Equality of rights is natures plan
And following nature is the march of man.
- Joel Barlow.

Of all the plagues a lover bears,
Sure rivals are the worst.
I can endure my own despair,
But not anothers hope.
- William Walsh

In love alone we hate to find
Companions to our woe.
- William Walsh

I knew, and know my hour has come, but not
To render up my soul to such as thee.
- Lord Byron, "Manfred"

Be near me when this sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pains that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging Flame.
- Tennyson, "In Memorium"

You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
- Shakespeare, "King Lear"

Only he deserves freedom and life
Who daily conquers them anew.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.
- Shakespeare, "Othello"

Look into my face; my name is Might-Have-Been;
I am also called No-More, Too-late, farewell.
- Dante Rosetti.

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
- John Donne

If you don't defend your honour, people will assume you have none.
- Michael Levine

Power corrupts, but some must govern.
- Stevie Smith

Thou much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now the strength that in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Tennyson, "UIlysses"

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
- William Hazlit

From heaven or hell, O Beauty, came you hence?
Out from your gaze, infernal and divine,
Pours blended evil and beneficence,
And therefore men have likened you to wine.
- Baudelaire

I know that sorrow is the one human strength
On which neither earth nor hell can impose,
And that the universe and all time's length
Must be wound into the mystic crown for my brows.
- Baudelaire

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Liberty can not be identified with any cause -- except the cause of liberty -- for its whole challenge is for the right to choose between causes.
-R. MacIver

Freedom is an immortal idea, which does not age with the spirit of the times and vanish.
- Thomas Mann

Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.
- Justin Morrill

You flee, but none pursue.
- Stevie Smith

Why is she weeping? In her lovely pride
She could have conquered the whole race of man;
What unknown evil harrows her lithe side?

She weeps, mad girl, because her life began;
Because she lives. One thing she does deplore
So much that she kneels trembling in the dust --
That she must live tomorrow, evermore,
Tomorrow and tomorrow -- as we must!
- Baudelaire

It is a clear truth that those who everyday barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.
- J. Otis

The very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power.
- Roosevelt

A selfish and greedy people cannot be free.
- Roosevelt

Free people remember this maxim: we may aquire liberty, but it is never recovered once lost.
- Rousseau

To renounce one's liberty is too renounce the quality of being a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties. No adequate compensation can be made to any person who has renounced it all.
- Rousseau

Our sins are stubborn, craven our repentance.
For our weak vows we ask excessive prices.
Trusting the tears will wash away the sentence,
We sneak off where the muddy road entices.
- Baudelaire

. . . That is love! Before your heart expire,
Let the glory of God set it afire;
That is the true Delight which can not rot!"

Then the Angel, cruel as he was kind,
With giant hands twisted him till he whined;
But the damned soul still answered. "I will not!"
- Baudelaire

Liberty is not a fruit that grows in all climates, and it is not within the reach of all.
- Rousseau

Where there is much liberty, there is much error.
- Fredrich Bon Schiller

Nature gives liberty even to dumb animals.
- Tacitus

Never yet has law formed a great man; it is liberty that breeds giants and heroes.
- F. Von Schiller

Thou inquirest what liberty is? It is to be slave to nothing, to no necessity, to no accident, to keep fortune at arm's length.
- Seneca

Liberty means responsibility. The is why most men dread it.
- George Bernard Shaw

The price of liberty is not merely eternal vigilance but also perpetual restraint.
- Lord Joseph Stamp

Be tranquil, O my Sorrow, and be wise.
The evening comes, is here, for which you sought:
The Dusk, wrapping the city in disguise,
Care unto some, to others peace has brought.
- Baudelaire

Ah race of Abel, your fat carcass
Will enrich the reeking soil!

Race of Cain, your hard work is
Not finished in spite of all;

Race of Abel, here your shame lies:
The sword lost to the hunter's rod!

Race of Cain, mount the skies
And down upon the earth cast God!
- Baudelaire

Of what use is freedom of thought, if it will not also produce freedom of action?
- Jonathan Swift

Liberties and masters are not easily combined.
- Tacitus

Why is liberty so rare? Because it is the chiefest good.
- Voltaire

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into truth.
- Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love . . .
- Yeats

Liberty of thought is the life of the soul
- Voltaire

The pursuit of freedom with an intolerant mentality is self defeating.
- A Whiteheard

I do not care for nature,
She does not care for me;
You can be alone with a person,
You can't be alone with a tree.
- Stevie Smith, "Lulu"

Since there's always going to be corruption, a good government is where you have a manageable level of corruption!
- Mercedes Lackey

Revenge; Timotheus cried, and in that shout
There's all there is about it and about
Between this man and me, whate'er befall
Their is no more to be said at all.
- Stevie Smith, "Revenge"

. . . the Goddess could not spend all her time persuading the Kings and Queens of the idiocy of war. Therefore, she invented tacticians.
- Diane Duane

If I lie down upon my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave, I may be elsewhere.
- Stevie Smith

Ability is nothing without opportunity.
- Napoleon

The greatest danger that democracy runs is not the intelligence of the people but the tendency of their leaders to uinderrate that intelligence.
- Russel Davenport

Democracy gives every man a right to be his own oppressor.
- James Russel Lowell

Freeing a people from the yoke of democracy is like trying to liberate a drunkard from the damnation of alcohol.
- Gulbrande Lunde

Democracy is an attempt to measure the exercise of political power by the ordinary man's sense of right and wrong.
- Lord Eustace Percy

I trod a foreign path, dears,
The silence was extreme
And so it came about, dears,
That I fell into dream,
That I fell into dream, my dear,
And feelings without cause.
And tears without a reason
And so was lost.
- Stevie Smith

Laughter in deaths shadow fools no one who understands death. But if you are moved to it, be assured the Goddess will smile at your joke.
- Diane Duane

If a general is ignorant of the principles of adaptabiliy, he must not be entrusted with a position of authority. The skilful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man and the stupid man. For the wise man delights in establishing his merit, the brave man likes to show his courage in action, the covetous man is quick at seizing advantages, and the stupid man has no fear of death.
- So Mo Ch'ien, The Art of War

Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- Lord Acton

An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.
- Arab proverb

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker

The Goddess' courtesy is a terrible thing. To the mortal asker she will give what is asked for, without stinting, without fail. Or will she stop until the gifts recipient, like the gift, becomes perfect Let the asker beware . . .
- Diane Duane

There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others.
- Elbert Hubbard

Liberty is not a luxury to be enjoyed, or a theory to be defined; it is a weapon to be used.
- Robert Jackson

One must be free in order to learn how to use one's powers wisely.
- Immanuel Kant

No amount of political freedom can satisfy the hungry masses.
- Lenin

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
- Lincoln

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people are fit to be free until they are fit to use their freedom. The notion is worthy of the fowl in the old story, who resolved not to so into water until he had learned how to swim.
- T. Macaulay

Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.
- James Madision

"Are you going to kill me?" said the child to the Dragon.
"Kill you?" The dragon smiled. "Certainly not until we have been introduced." - Diane Duane

Change is not progress.
- H.L. Mencken

To freemen, threats are vain.
- Cicero

"If their was no evil, who would fear Hell?"
- Tad Williams, "The Stone of Farewell"

Luck affects everything.
- Ovid

The general who wins a battle makes man calculations before the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.
- Oliver Goldsmith

Fortune favours the bold.
- Juneval

Of this I am certain that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel of oppression upon the minority.
- Edmund Burke

The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.
- Henri Berque

Who, then, is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honour of the world, who relies wholly on himself whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished.
- Horace

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society.
- Ibsen

I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things: never live beneath the noose of a servile halter.
- William Wallace

The key to a crisis is to survive.
- Jordan MacLeod

Some people say "What is life without friends?" I say: "What is life without happiness?"
- Jordan MacLeod

There are no dumb question, only dumb people asking questions.
- Randy Cassingham

All certain tyrant's over souls wish for men they teach is that they should have unsound minds.
- Voltaire

No more vital truth was ever uttered than that freedom and free institutions can not long be maintained by people who do not understand the nature of their own government.
- Woodrow Wilson

. . . was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?
- John Mill

Every path hath its puddle.
- English Proverb

Many words hurt more than swords.
- Anonymous

The individual is indisputably the original, the first fact of liberty. . . . There is no such thing as corporate liberty. Liberty belongs to the individual or it does not exist.
- Woodrow Wilson

Anger punishes itself.
- Anonymous

For one rich man that is content, there are a hundred that are not.
- Anonymous

Many persons might have attained to wisdom had they not assumed that they already possessed it.
- Seneca

Life, misfortune, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than illustrious heroes.
- Victor Hugo

Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.
- Voltaire

A wise man reflects before he speaks; a fool, speaks and then reflects on what he has uttered.
- French Proverb

It is perhaps one of life's most interesting ironies that, of the many who beseech the Goddess to send them love, so few will accept it when it comes, because it has come in what they consider the wrong shape, or the wrong size, or at the wrong time. Against our prejudices, even the Goddess strives in vain.
- Diane Duane

We see more clearly what others fail to do for us than what they actually do.
- Anonymous

The injuries we do and those we suffer are seldom weighed on the same scale.
- Aesop

We are afraid of the truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plumb hell or heaven, what's the difference? Plumb the unknown, to find out something new!
- Baudelaire

One life -- a little gleam of time between two eternities.
- Carlyle

Some are atheists only in fair weather.
- Anonymous

A man of words and not of deeds
is like a garden full of weeds.
- Unknown

Depend upon in, Sir, when a man knows he is too be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
- Samuel Johnson

Adversity reminds men of religion.
- Livy

And that is what evil does: forces us down dark pathways we otherwise would not have trod.
- Denis L. McKeirnan

I challenge you to cite me one instance in all the history of the world where liberty was handed down from above. Liberty always is attained by the forces working below . . . . by the great movement of the people. That, leavened by the sense of wrong and oppression and injustice, brings freedom.
- Woodrow Wilson

. . . it is the way of our living that is testament to our spirits, and perhaps the way we die . . .
- Denis L. McKeirnan

When money speaks, the truth is silent.
- Russian Proverb

Silence is a virtue of those who are not wise.
- Anonymous

Patience is a necessary ingredient in genius.
- Benjamin Disraeli

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.
- Roosevelt

He that imagines he hath knowledge enough hath none.
- Anonymous

But if for no other reason, Evil must be destroyed so that we can once more guide our own destinies.
- Denis L McKeirnan

The least desirable possibility will always exert itself when the results will be most frustrating.
- Gunderson's Law

Those who most crave sainthood are most often driven toward hell.
- Anonymous

Perversity is in perception, not in the thing perceived.
- Christopher Stassheff, "Her Majesty's Wizard"

In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means . . . If reason has failed us, their remains always the ultima ratio, the power of the miraculous and mysterious.
- Ernest Cassier

Visit, that you not be visited.
- Anonymous

It is about as hard for a rich man to enter Heaven as it is for a poor man to remain on earth.
- Anonymous

Never fight until your right cannot be questioned; then delay not to strike.
- Christopher Stassheff, "Her Majesty's Wizard"

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.
- Woodrow Wilson

Liberty is often a fierce and intractable thing, to which no bounds can be set.
-Woodrow Wilson

Never be too far from arms, for all men have the blood of Cain.
- Christopher Stassheff, "Her Majesty's Wizard"

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Emiliano Zapata

The only wealth which you keep forever is the wealth which you have given away.
- Anonymous

To him in vain the envious seasons roll,
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
- Unknown

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
- Abraham Lincoln

All time is lost that might better be employed.
- Anonymous

After even the fiercest sunset comes the twilight; and in the twilight, anything is rather more than less likely to happen.
- Diane Duane

Never seek more power than God gives, for he will match it to your tasks.
- Christopher Stassheff, "Her Majesty's Wizard"

Have many acquaintances and few friends.
- English Proverb

. . . the writers function is not without arduous duties. By definition, be can not serve today and those who make history: he must serve those who are subject to it.
- Albert Camus

He that boasteth of his ancestors, confsseth that he hath no virtue of his own.
- Anonymous

The willing contemplation of vice is vice.
- Arabian Proverb

Know yourself, and always question what manner of man you have become.
- Christopher Stassheff, "Her Majesty's Wizard"

Silence is the door between love and fear; and on fears side, there is no latch.
- Diane Duane

Reality is no one's dream.
- Joan D Vinge, "Psion"

Whatever may be said of the Goddess, this much is certain: She enjoys a good joke. For proof of this, examine yourself or any other memeber of the human race closely -- and laugh along with her.
- Diane Duane

Memory is a mirror -- but even the clearest mirror reverses left to right.
- Diane Duane

It is better to have one shilling than to lend twenty.
- English Proverb

A scalded cat fears cold water.
- Unknown

Hope is the poor man's bread.
- Anonymous

All cruelty springs from weakness.
- Seneca

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
- Robert Burns

We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.
- Corneille

What a day may bring, a day may take away.
- Fuller

A people without faith in themselves cannot survive.
- Chinese Proverb

Those who are happy do not observe how time goes by.
- Chinese Proverb

All men are fools, differing only in degree.
- English Proverb

No answer is also an answer.
- Danish Proverb

Every man complains of his memory, but no man complains of his judgement.
- English Proverb

Call no man happy till he is dead.
- Aeschylus

For he that lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
- Wilde

We are never deceived, we deceive ourselves.
- Goethe

A diplomat is a man who remembers a lady's birthday but forgets her age.
- Anonymous

Men would be angels;
Angels would be gods.
- Alexander Pope

Every fire is the same size when it starts.
- Anonymous

More die from gluttony than hunger.
- Anonymous

Kindle not a fire you cannot put out.
- Chinese Proverb

The more one comes to know man, the more one comes to admire the dog.
- Joussenal

It is better to be envied than pitied.
- Herodotus

Of two evils, choose the least.
- Erasmus

When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps; when he says perhaps, he means no; when he says no, he is no diplomat.
- Anonymous

What is evil? -- whatever springs from weakness.
- Neitzsche

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
- Aristotole

Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
- Neitzsche

Faults are thick where love is thin.
- Anonymous

Cheat me in the price, but not in the goods.
- English Proverb

Many Praised the victory,
Many mourned the slain;
Yet all prayed that nevermore
Would War come here again.
- Denis L McKeirnan

The thief is sorry to be hanged, not to be a thief.
- Anonymous

It is the thief who is hanged, not the one who is caught stealing.
- Czech Proverb

Whoever profits by a crime is guilty of it.
- French Proverb

Our pleasures are shallow, our sorrows are deep.
- Chinese Proverb

Adversity is the trial of courage.
- Anonymous

Little children are little sorrows but great joys.
- Italian Proverb

To reproach a man because his moral sense was corruptible was like blaming him for susceptibility to yellow fever.
- Dainel Boorstren

A good conscience is God's eye.
- Russian Proverb

If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
- Neitzsche

The sun shines also on the wicked.
- Seneca

Criticism is easy; art, difficult.
- French Proverb

[The Grand Inquisitor] . . . we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them -- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them we are Thy servants and rule in Thy name. We shall deceive them again . . . That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
- Fyodor Dostoyeusky

That which has to be done usually can be done.
- Joan D Vinge, "Catspaw"

When you start at the bottom, there is no way you can sink any deeper.
- Joan D Vinge, "Catspaw"

Let's not be too critical of the tabacco industry. After all, it has found a cure for old age.
- Lloyd Clark

It is so much easier to do good than to be good.
- Anonymous

Make your whole years plans in the spring and your days plans in the morning.
- Chinese Proverb

Customers are precious things; goods are only gross.
- Chinese Proverb

. . . this is as absurd as to compare a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with an highway cutthroat. Both use a knife, perhaps the same kind of knife, both do the same thing, vis. cut the throat of a living man; yet one is a well-doer, the other is a murderer.
- Eugene Zamiatin

It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistaken, even absurd beleifs; so we may fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that the historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.
- Herbert Huller

Though a tree be a thousand feet high, the leaves fall and return to the root.
- Chinese Proverb

He uses a cannon to shoot a sparrow.
- Chinese Proverb

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
- Anonymous

It is easier to be accepted by our society as a murderer than as a homosexual.
- Abby Mann.

Perversions of the psychological principle (purgation by scapegoat, congregation by segregation) are the constant temptations of human societies, whose orders are built by a kind of animal exceptionally adept in the ways of symbolic action
- Kenneth Burke

Wisdom consists in knowing one's follies.
- Anonymous

To see a man do a good deed is to forget all his faults
- Chinese Proverb

Adversity makes men; prosperity monsters.
- Anonymous

. . . The gods who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm . . .
- Tennyson

Without the aid of the divine, man cannot walk even an inch.
- Chinese Proverb

If heaven creates a man, there must be some use for him.
- Chinese Proverb

To follow the will of heaven is to prosper, to rebel against the will of heaven is to be destroyed.
- Chinese Proverb

The imagination gallops while judgement goes on foot.
- Anonymous

Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lossed,
We should not lose, we should only be tossed.
Nay, e'en suppose, when we had suffered fate,
The soul could feel in her divided state,
What's that to us? For we are only we
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.
- Lucretius, from "Why Fear Death?"

Do not proud monarchs flinch, stricken in every limb by terror of the gods and the thought that the time has come when some foul deed or arrogant word must pay its heavy, heavy price?
- Lucretius

Years teach more than books.
- Anonymous

Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.
- T. S. Elliot

Money is a good servant but a bad master.
- Anonymous

To the right-thinking man, to be alone and to be wrong are the same.
- Jean Paul Sarte

Forgive every man's faults, except your own.
- Anonymous

"They question my right to the title of philanthropist," Marat exclaims . . . "Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to serve a greater number?" . . . Naturally -- all historic actions are performed at a price. But Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads. But he compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: "Brand them with hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues!"
- Albert Camus

Democracy is a government of the people by an elite sprung from the people.
- Maurice Duvanger

Experience and wisdom are the two best fortune tellers.
- Anonymous

He is truly happy who makes others happy.
- English Proverb

It belongs only to great men to possess great defects.
- Unknown

There are no great men, only great circumstances with which ordinary men are forced to cope.
- Admiral Halsey

Friend, if the mute and shrouded dead
Are touched at all by tears,
By love long fled and friendship sped,
And the unreturning years.
O then, to her that early died,
O doubt not, bridegroom, to thy bride
Thy love is sweet and sweeteneth
The very bitterness of death.
- Catullus, 'The Same"

I hate her -- yet I love her too.
You ask how this can be.
I only know that it is true
And bitter agony.
- Catullus, "Love and Hatred"

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
- Ben Johnson

Democracy is the worst form of government . . .except for all the others.
- Winston Churchill

Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.
- Anonymous

Unless your care's exact, your judgement nice
The flight from folly leads but into vice.
- Horace

There are no enemies save those we love . . .
- Propertius

The town is as old as the human race
And it grows with the flight of years,
It is wrapped in the fog of idler's dreams,
It's streets are paved with discarded schemes,
And sprinkled with useless tears.
- W. E. Penny, from "The Town of Nogood"

The town of Nogood is hedged about
By the mountains of Despair.
No sentinel stands on its gloomy walls,
No trumpet to battle and triumph calls,
For cowards alone are there.
- W. E. Penny, from "The Town of Nogood"

Admiration: our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
- Ambrose Bierce

It is easy to govern a kingdom but difficult to rule one's family.
- Chinese Proverb

"I am an atheist, thank God!"
- Anonymous

There is always grief. It is joy that is the rarest thing.
- Guy Gavriel Kay

Do the thing nearest at hand and great things will come to your hand to be done.
- Douglas Malloch

Rattling around in to big a job is worse than filling a small job to overflowing.
- Douglas Malloch

Make the most of what you have and are. Perhaps your trivial, immediate task is your one sure way of proving your mettle.
- Douglas Malloch

"Even this shall pass away"
- Tilton

Art is a kind of illness.
- Puccini

He is rich who is contented.
- Anonymous

Blame yourself as you would blame others, excuse others as you would excuse yourself.
- Chinese Proverb

One man tells a falsehood, a hundred repeat it as true.
- Chinese Proverb

Once I was pure as the beautiful snow -- but I fell:
Fell, like the snowflake, from heaven -- to hell;
Fell, to be tramped as the filth in the street;
Fell, to be scoffed, to be spit on and beat.
Pleading,
Cursing,
Dreading to die,
Selling my soul to whoever would buy,
Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread,
Hating the living and fearing the dead.
Merciful God! Have I fallen so low?
And yet I was once like this beautiful snow!

Once I was fair as the beautiful snow,
With an eye like its crystals, a heart like its glow;
Once I was loved for my innocent grace,
Flattered and sought for the charm of my face.
Father,
Mother,
Sister all,
God, and myself, I have lost in my fall.
The veriest wretch that goes shining by
Will take a wide sweep, lest I wander to nigh;
For all that is on, or about me, I know
There is nothing that's pure but the beautiful snow.

How strange it should be that the beautiful snow
Should fall on a sinner with nowhere to go!
How strange it should be, when the night comes again,
If the snow and the ice struck my desperate brain!
Fainting,
Freezing,
Dying alone,
Too wicked for prayer, too weak for my moan
To be heard in the crash of the crazy town,
Gone mad with its joy at the snow coming down;
To lie and to die in my terrible woe,
With a bed and a shroud of the beautiful snow!
- John Wittaker Watson, from "Beautiful Snow"

We learn by teaching
- Latin Proverb

Noble ancestry makes a poor dish at a table.
- Italian Proverb

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, others judge us by what we have already done.
- Longfellow

A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.
- Lord John Russels

No one has ever repented of having held his tongue.
- Anonymous

No man is worse for knowing the worse of himself.
- Spanish Proverb

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously is every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must learn how not to be virtuous . . . according to need.
- Machiavelli, 'The Prince"

Without me the world cannot exist for a moment. For is not all that us done . . . among mortals full of folly; is it not performed by fools for fools?
- Erasmus

We never get everything we want . . . but sometimes we get what we need.
- Joan D Vinge

If you have trouble forecasting the future correctly, do it frequently and at very short intervals.
- Anonymous

Love thy neighbour, but do not pull down thy fence.
- English Proverb

Don't go through life thinking the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Self-discipline is when your conscience tells you to do something and you don't talk back.
- Janet and Greta Podeleski

Until my day comes, nothing can hurt me; when my day comes, nothing can save me.
- Arab Proverb

A translator is a traitor.
- Italian Proverb

At times like this, I cannot affords to make enemies.
- reputedly said by Machiavelli on his death bed when asked to abjure the Devil

For most people, the only one who sees into their soul is God. And most of us wish even God was a little nearsighted.
- Joan D Vinge

Men in general judge more from appearance than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of perception.
- Machiavelli

The defects of a preacher are soon spied.
- Martin Luther

Diet: a short period of starvation preceding a gain of five pounds.
- Janet and Greta Podeleski

As a career, the business of an orthodox preacher is about as successful as that of a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through Hell.
- Elbert Hubbard

Nothing is impossible to a willing mind.
- Anonymous

The ear is the road to the heart.
- French Proverb

O Crime: with ruin thy road is strewn;
The brightest beauty the world had known
Thy power has wasted, till in the mind
No trace of its presence is left behind.

The loathsome wretch in the dungeon low,
With a face like a fiend and a look of woe,
Ruined by revels of crime and sin,
A pitiful wreck of what might have been,
Hated and shunned, and without a home,
Was the child that played in the streets or Rome.
- Unknown, from "Two Pictures"

One foe is too many, a hundred friends too few.
- German Proverb

Custom is the law of fools.
- Vambrugh

Conscience is the only incorruptible thing about us.
- Fielding

Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell.
- Byron (writing about the conscience)

Self conquest is the greatest of victories.
- Plato

To rejoice in conquest is to rejoice in murder.
- Lao Tsu

One need first dance to the music before learning to sing the song.
- Norman Spinrad, "Child of Fortune"

He who is the cause of another's greatness is himself undone.
- Machiavelli, "The Prince"

All that wisdom teaches us is that the ability to act is only the power to make things worse.
- Norman Spinrad, "Child of Fortune"

The first allegiance of a teller is to the tale.
- Norman Spinrad, "Child of Fortune"

To open a book brings profit
- Chinese Proverb

There is no high road to happiness or misfortune; every man brings them on himself .
- Chinese Proverb

We always love those who admire us and we do not always love those we admire.
- La Rochefoucauld

The wisest of the wise may err.
- Greek Proverb

He that pities another remembers himself.
- English Proverb

Power seldom grows old at court.
- English Proverb

Love lives in cottages as well as in castles.
- Anonymous

The five truths, terrible and joyous:

What is, is.
What was, is.
Matter is an illusion.
Meaning is an illusion.
The door opens both ways.
Believe none of these!
- Diane Duane

Offer an enemy a false show of hospitality in order to damn him and the fires shall fall on your head, not his, Give him the truth with his meat and drink, and trust it not to sour the wine.
- Diane Duane

God brings man into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them
- Anonymous

The heaviest rains fall on the leaky house.
- Anonymous

A good man makes no noise over a good deed.
- Greek Proverb

It is easy to go from economy to extravagance; it is hard to go from extravagance to economy.
- Chinese Proverb

Words are the voice of the heart.
- Chinese Proverb

The easiest way to dignity is humility.
- Anonymous

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
- Anonymous

Envy never enriched any man.
- Anonymous

There is no mortal whom sorrow and disease do not touch.
- Greek Proverb

Confession of faults makes half amends.
- English Proverb

The friendship of officials is as thin as paper.
- Chinese Proverb

Yellow gold hath its price, learning is priceless
- Chinese Proverb

The wound is healed
by the sword that deals it;

the heart is knit
by the pain that breaks it;

the life is made whole
by the death that starts it;

the death is made whole
by the life that ends it.
- Diane Duane

Even if we study to old age, we shall not finish learning.
- Chinese Proverb

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.
- Syrus

Rejection is the hell he fears
- John Steinbeck

The man on horseback knows nothing of the toil of the traveller on foot.
- Chinese Proverb

Without the media, there would be no terrorism.
- Marshal McLuhan

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the only true place for a just man is also a prison.
- Thoreau

When you know a man, you know his face, but not his heart.
- Chinese Proverb

A wise man knows everything; a shrewd man, everyone.
- Anonymous

Praise the sea, but keep on land.
- English Proverb

Pray for yourself, I am not sick.
- English Proverb

He has much prayer but little devotion.
- English Proverb

He who has never hoped can never despair.
- Syrus

Fortune favours him . . . in the opposite moment of his death.
- Tacitus

They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.
- Charles-Maurice de Tallleyrand

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your hearts desire. The other is to get it.
- George Bernard Shaw

A short prayer penetrates haven
- English Proverb

Assassination is an extreme form of censorship.
- George Bernard Shaw

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
- George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is ever done until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
- George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with people is not that they know so much, but that they know so much that ain't so.
- Henry Shaw (Josh Billings)

Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
that here obedient to her world we lie.
- Simonides

Fences have their purpose, but serving as pathways was never one of them.
- Christopher Stassheff

You've got to be careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get their.
- Yogi Berra

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- Albert Einstein

When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.
- Anonymous

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Fear nothing but sin.
- English Proverb

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they might not go to yours.
- Yogi Berra

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
- Anonymous

There are three types of people -- those who can count and those who can't.
- Anonymous

He that fears death lives not.
- English Proverb

Fear is stronger than love.
- English Proverb

Happiness is not having what you want. It's wanting what you have.
- Anonymous

Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love.
- Unknown

Chaos itself is the ultimate pinnacle upon which all order is recomplicated.
- Norman Spinrad, "Child of Fortune"

Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary.
- Anonymous

Before the singer was the song.
- Norman Spinrad, "Child of Fortune"

Only when the moment lapses and is gone, can it really be known. Thus the moment is everything, and nothing too.
- Ian Watson

I married beneath me. All women do.
- Lady Nancy Astor, first female MP in the United Kingdom

Extreme love is extreme wrong.
- English Proverb

There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death.
- Robert Jordan, "Fires of Heaven"

If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.
- Asimov

Memory, prophecy and fantasy --
the past, the future and
the dreaming moment between --
are all one country
living one immortal day.

To know that is wisdom.

To use it is the Art.
- Clive Barker, "The Great and Secret Show"

There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
- Frances Bacon

Who is more foolish -- the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?
- Maurice Freehall

A wolf must die in his own skin.
- Morris L West

So much hope against the sea and loneliness of the hills.
- Morris L West

The hills will still be here and the children will still be here when you are gone. If you want to cry, be done with it now.
- Morris L West

Envy never dies.
- English Proverb

He that will enter into paradise must have a good key.
- English Proverb

. . . our actions show what's in our hearts.
- Bill Watterson, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

The problem with the future is that it keeps becoming the present.
- Bill Watterson, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

The evils we bring on ourselves are the hardest to bear.
- English Proverb

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.
- Mae West

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
- Anonymous

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
- Anonymous

There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over.
- Anonymous

You need money to make money.
- Sam MacLeod

Nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
- Anonymous

Of evil grain no good can come.
- English Proverb

If only I had known. I would have been a locksmith.
- Albert Einstein

That which is evil is soon learned.
- English Proverb

Of evil manners spring good laws.
- English Proverb

A man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun.
- Unknown (Al Capone?)

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein

Stupidity is a personal achievement that transcends national boundaries.
- Anonymous

You will as soon get a fart out of a dead man.
- English Proverb

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Anonymous

Death defies the doctor.
- English Proverb

Death is a remedy for all ills.
- English Proverb

The death of a young wolf never comes too soon.
- English Proverb

Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
- Anonymous

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
- Anonymous

The glass is neither half full nor half empty. It is twice as large as it needs to be.
- Anonymous

To deceive a deceiver is no deceit.
- English Proverb

To deceive oneself is very easy.
- English Proverb

He that deceives me once, shame fall on him; he that deceives me twice, shame fall on me.
- English Proverb

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?
- Leonard Rossiter

May education never become as expensive as ignorance.
- Anonymous

Live so that you won't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.
- Will Rogers

Greed is like a river; the farther it flows, the wider it becomes.
- Amur Proverb

A mans destiny is always dark
- English Proverb

One moment of illumination outweighs an eternity of blind ignorance.
- Ian Watson

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,
Hope is the dream of the waking man.
- Pliny the Elder

A poem should not mean
But be.
- Archibald MacLeish

Children are the most expensive form of entertainment.
- Mihaela Iosof

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
- Stanislaw Lec

Where none will, the devil himself must bear the cross.
- English Proverb

Fate leads the willing but drives the stubborn
- English Proverb

There is a joy of being
Which you must be still and learn.
- Denis Lee

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
- A E Houseman

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Looks into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
- A E Houseman

Therefore since the world has still
Much good but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
- A E Houseman

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person that you are.
- Anonymous

Forbidden fruit is sweet.
- English Proverb

Don't confuse excellence, which is achievable, with perfection, which is elusive.
- Anonymous

He is so full of himself that he is quite empty
- English Proverb

Genius is the capacity for evading hard work.
- Elbert Hubbard

Creative minds have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
- Anna Freud

Women who want equality with men lack ambition.
- Graffiti

It's okay to make mistakes; at least it shows you're working.
- Ed Mirvish

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
- Mell Lazarus

The easiest way for your child to learn about money is for you not to have any.
- Kathleen Whitehorn

Sometimes the best gain is to lose.
- English Proverb

Where god has his church, the devil has a chapel.
- English Proverb

God help the poor for the rich can help themselves.
- English Proverb

God sends meat and the devil sends cooks
- English Proverb

God send you joy, for sorrow will come soon enough.
- English Proverb

Those who know the least obey the best.
- George Fonquar

The hardest job facing kids today is learning good manners without seeing any.
- Fred Astaire

The road to riches is always under construction.
- Anonymous

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.
- Ethel Barrymore

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.
- English Proverb

Hell will never be full till you be in it.
- English Proverb

Hell is where heaven is not.
- Unknown

Cats were put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.
- Anonymous

When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did -- in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming -- like the passengers in his car.
- Anonymous

To know how to suggest is the greatest art of teaching
- Frederick Amiel

When you have a fight with your conscience and lose, you win.
- Anonymous

I am not young enough to know everything.
- J M Barrie

I am the tooth fairy, I loosen teeth.
- Spencer

Society prepares the crime and the criminal merely commits it.
- Mike Barr

Each individual is a part of society, and indeed he is that society.
- Mike Barr

One of the first duties of the physician is too educate the masses not to take medicine.
- Sir William Osler

It is easy to be wise after the event.
- English Proverb

Trust is the mother of deceit.
- English Proverb

He who trusts not is not deceived.
- English Proverb

God strikes with his finger, and not with all his arm
- English Proverb

A man should preserve his integrity, though he must sell his soul to do it.
- Eric Nicol

I am afraid of the worst, but I am not sure what that is.
- Abraham Rotsein

Is not anger the cleanest of passions?
- Grattan o'Leary

We listen to others to discover what we ourselves believe.
- George Grant

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
- Diefenbaker

To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.
- Lionel Tiger

Idealist: A cynic in the making.
- Irving Layton

Truth may be blamed, but cannot be shamed.
- English Proverb

Statistics are for losers.
- Harry Hayes

Monarchy is like virginity, once lost it cannot be regained.
- Unknown (possibly Andrew Morton, but I am not sure)

Man wants to live. But it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all of his actions.
- Anonymous

It is a great victory that comes without bloodshed.
- English Proverb

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is getting what you need.
- Anonymous

The past must no longer be used as an anvil for beating out the present and the future.
- Paul-Emile Boudras

We can only pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
- John Buchan

Behind every successful man there is a surprised woman.
- Maryon Pearson

If the people have not suffered enough, it is their God-given right to suffer some more.
- William Aberhard

To contemplate suicide is surely the best exercise of the imagination.
- Phyillis Web

You can't drink yourself sober, you can't spend yourself rich, and the power to tax is the power to destroy.
- Colonel Eric Phillips

Time is, time was and time is past.
- English Proverb

We giving all gained all.
Neither lament us nor praise.
Only in all things recall,
It is fear, not Death that slays.
- Rudyard Kipling

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
- George Isles

Some people might as well be crazy for all the sense they have.
- Bob Edwards

The value of experience lies not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
- Sir William Osler

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
- Sir William Osler

In the long run, there is no such thing as a prophet without honour.
- Seguin

Vows made in storms are forgotten in calms.
- English Proverb

Well begun is half done.
- English Proverb

There must somewhere have been an ancient Chinese philosopher who said: "The summit of all human wisdom is to know the exact shade of grey to wear on any particular occasion."
- Sir Robert Watson-Watt

Wisdom is a variable possession. Every man is wise when pursued by as mad dog, fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
- Robertson Davies

The boasts of heraldry, the pomp of power
And all the beauty, all the wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
- Fray

Better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
- Anonymous

We carry in our very bones the minds of our forebears. No, a nation cannot separate itself from the past anymore than a river can separate itself from its source, or sap from the soil whence it arises. No generation is self-sufficient. it can, and does, happen that a generation forgets its history, or turns its back on it; such an act is a betrayal of history.
- Canan Groulx

Without any paradox I would boldly say that history is the most living of things and there is nothing more present than the past.
- Canan Groulx

There are, of course, many things in Ontario that are more dangerous than wolves. For instance, the step ladder.
- J W Curran

The day the child realises that all adults are imperfect he becomes an adolescent, the day he forgives them, be becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
- Alden Nowlan

Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.
- Unknown

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
- Neitzsche

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
- Woody Allen

You can't depend on your eyes when your imaginations out of focus.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it.
- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands

Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
- Douglas Adams

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
- Elvis Presley

Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
- George Bernard Shaw

Genius may have its limitations but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
- Elbert Hubbard

War is too important to be left in the lands of generals.
- Georges Clemenceau

There is little to choose between the pen and the sword. Too often, both write in blood.
- Diane Duane

I think I love you
and the problem
is the thinking.
- Diane Duane

The only thing more to be feared than a great desire is that same desire come true.
- Diane Duane

Better the dark under the stone than the sandstorm unexpected.
- Diane Duane

A timely marriage: one made before your children start nagging you about it.
- Diane Duane

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.
- James Joyce

The picture of the loved,
Long we hold in our heart:
then come home to find
the two have grown apart:

Which to keep and which to kill:
Should there be a doubt?
But how we clip the dead to us
and throw the living out. . .
- Diane Duane

Even the Goddess cannot change the past. But human beings can; and to that purpose she created them.
- Diane Duane

I thoroughly disprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
- Mark Twain

Not only is life a bitch, it has puppies.
- Adrienne E Gustoff

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get stuck in jet engines.
- John Renfield

Common sense is not so common.
- Voltaire

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
- Voltaire

When love is gone, there's always justice And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always mom Hi, Mom!
-Laurie Anderson

Never mistake motion for action.
- Anonymous

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
- Euripides

I expect woman will be the last thing civilised by man.
- George Meredith

We find comfort among those who agree with us -- growth among those who don't.
- Frank Clark

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
- Groucho Marx

Anyone capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.
- Douglas Adams

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.
- Scott Adams

He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.
- Harry Fosdick

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage
- Mark Russel

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. if you're alive, it isn't.
- Richard Bach

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
- Bob Wells

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
- Hubert Humphrey

Don't mess up my mess.
- Nancy Townsend

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

What every computer consultant needs to know:
1) In case of doubt, make it sound convincing
2) Do not believe in miracles, rely on them
- Murphy's Computer Laws (Finagle's Rules)

Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
- Last words of Poncho Villa

The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism.
- Norman Brenner

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
- Russel Baker

Well done is better than well said.
- Anonymous

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
- H H Williams

One does not have a sense of humour. It has you.
- Larry Gelbart

The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
- George Orwell

When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"
- Don Marquis

Oh, I don't blame congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
- Lichty and Wagner

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
- Cyril Conolly

Crime does not pay . . . as well as politics.
- Alfred E Newman

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
- Charles Schultz

Why was I born with such contemporaries?
- Oscar Wilde

Never explain -- your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
- Elbert Hubbard

Distance: the only thing the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Indecision: the chief element of success.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Ultimatum: in diplomacy, a last resort before resorting to concessions.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Faith: belief without evidence in something that is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, of things without parallel.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman (1943)

If a mans notions of right and wrong have any other basis other than expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependant upon, their consequences -- then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can get with a kind word alone.
- Al Capone

Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.
- Anonymous

76.4% of all statistics are meaningless.
- Anonymous

In the early days, all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation, I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.
- Les Claypool

Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who don't.
- Anonymous

When 25% of the population believe that the president should be impeached, and 51% believe in UFO's, you may or may not need a new president, but you definitely need a new population.
- Harry Reasoner

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.
- Anonymous

Banks are places that will lend you money if you prove that you don't need it.
- Bob Hope

My past is my wisdom to use today . . . my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present moment because that is where life resides.
- Anonymous

Most things, excerpt agriculture, can wait.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

I am ashes where once I was fire.
- Byron

Fail to plan, plan to fail
- Anonymous

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has a limit. If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards.
- Anonymous

Here all are noble, save nobility.
- Byron

I wish he would explain his explanation.
- Byron

The weak alone repent.
- Byron

You have ventured deeply,
But all must do so who would greatly win.
- Byron

The Guards die, but do not surrender.
- Peirre-Jauqes, baron de Comronne

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
- Carlyle

To whom nothing is given, of whom nothing can be required.
- Henry Fielding

If a dinosaur can become a hummingbird, all things are possible.
- Ronald Wright (speaking about Evolution)

Revenge proves its own executioner.
- John Ford

Those who say it is better to die free than to live as a slave must think long and truly before they say it.
- Christopher Stassheff

The philosopher told us that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom but he forgot that vigilance must all too frequently end in war.
- Christopher Stassheff

He who swims in sin sinks in sorrow.
- English Proverb

It is useless to plan for the unexpected . . . by definition!
- Alfred Hitchcock

An agent is a vampire with a telephone!
- Robert Aspin, "Mything Perons"

What's wrong with a little harmless crime once in a while?
- M Blaise

History is the essence of innumerable bibliographies.
- Carlyle

Don't become so wise that you are stupid.
- Robert Aspin, "Mything Perons"

In a crisis, I'll try anything however stupid.
- Robert Aspin, "Mything Perons"

The thing you are most afraid of is always the thing that happens -- always.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

The supreme test of any civilisation is whether it can socialise men by teaching them how to be father's.
- Margaret Meade

But why should honour outlive honesty?
- William Shakespeare, "Othello"

An honourable murderer, if you will,
For naught I did in hate, but all in honour.
- William Shakespeare, "Othello"

You have not half the power to do me harm
As I have to be hurt.
- William Shakespeare, "Othello"

I'm not trying to claim that I am morally perfect, I'm only saying that I'm expensive.
- Mr Rootham (in ENG OA)

I am a brigand, I live by robbing the rich,
I am a gentleman, I live by robbing the poor.
- George Bernard Shaw

To tax and to please, no more than to love and be wise, is not given to men.
- Edmund Burke

Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.
- Dotti Walters

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
- Stalin

God didn't create the world in seven days: he pulled an all-nighter on the sixth!
- Anonymous

Ear of mankind
overgrown with nettles
would you hear?

If the voice of the prophets blew
on flutes made of murdered children's bones --
and exhaled airs burnt with
martyrs' cries --
if they built a bridge of old men's dying
groans --

Ear of mankind
occupied with small sounds
would you hear?
- Nelly Sachs, in "O the Chimneys"

That is the great thing about our movement -- that these numbers are uniform not only in ideas, but, even the facial expression is almost the same!
- Adolf Hitler

Familiarity breeds children.
- Unknown

The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last.
- Tanith Lee

It's like dega vu all over again.
- Yogi Berra

Only when I have ceased to breath will I be dead.
- Chris Farley, in "The Great White Ninja"

Absence makes the heart grow fonder but it also makes it wander.
- Nancy Townsend

When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is probable.
- Descartes

Art ends where violence begins. Violence begins where knowledge ends.
- Anonymous

Attitude, not aptitude, determines altitude.
- Z. Ziglar

The most difficult thing to predict is not the future but the past.
- Russian Proverb

There is a wolf out there, baying for my blood. We must exterminate wolves.
- Stalin (two weeks before his death)

Water can be good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.
- Democritus

In combat there is no sanity, only useful ways of being insane.
- Jack Cady

I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better.
- Stephen King, "Danse Macabre"

If you believe, no proof is necessary; if you doubt, no proof is sufficient.
- Kenneth Woodward

It isn't what teenagers know that worries their parents, its how they found out!
- Anonymous

In such dangerous things as wars, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.
- von Clausewitz

Defeat will only make us dead, not honourable.
- Barbara Hambly

God protect us from what we may one day get used too.
- Barbara Hambly

A man should go to jail for his beliefs at least once.
- Nicholas Monsarrat, "The Time Before This"

The first requisite of the genius is sheer ruthlessness.
- Brian Moore

Certainy and faith do not belong together.
- David Gemmel

If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.
- Terry Pratchett

. . . at least the way was clear now. When you step off a cliff, your life takes a very definite direction.
- Terry Pratchett

Chaos always defeats order because it is better organised.
- Terry Pratchett

Imagination is a quality given to a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humour is provided to console him for what he is.
- Anonymous

Running into debt isn't so bad, its running into creditors that hurts.
- Anonymous

I can resist anything except temptation.
- Oscar Wilde

When you know what to do when their is something to be done -- that's tactics. When you know what to do when their is nothing to be done -- that's strategy.
- Melanie Rawn

To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
- Jean Coteau

Only when the power of love overcomes the love of power will the world know peace.
- Anonymous

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
- Faulkner

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
-Unknown

It is easier to be long than short.
- Samuel Butler

It will be lonely to be dead, but it cannot be much more lonely that is it to be alive.
- Joan D Vinge, "Tin Soldier"

. . . there is nothing new under the sun. But there are always new ways of looking at it, and always other suns.
- Joan D Vinge, "Tin Soldier"

. . . if one always listened to the voice of reason, one would never do anything interesting.
- Zelazny and Sheckley

The bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also our enemies -- probably because they are generally the same people.
- Anonymous

He who leaves all things to chance makes a lottery of life.
- Anonymous

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
- William Blake

Go the extra mile. It's never crowded.
- Executive Speechwriter Newsletter

None of us is as smart as all of us.
- Phil Condit

Home is an invention which no one has yet improved.
- Ann Douglas

No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.
- David Eddings, "King of the Murgos"

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.
- Michael Cibenko

Childhood is measured out by sound and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.
- John Betjemen

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
- Lillian Hellman

Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what they are talking about.
- Sam Ewing

When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to a quest for power.
- Alston Chase, "In a Dark Wood"

Tattoo - permanent proof of temporary insanity.
- Wise and Aldrich

Coincidences throw open a skylight to a universe more mysterious and mischievous than we dare imagine. They tune our ear to the sound of cosmic laughter.
- Sylvia Fraser

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends on whether you are at the right end of the wrong end of the gun.
- Anonymous

Diplomacy - Letting someone else have your way.
- Lester B Pearson

Culture is not satisfied 'till the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.
- Mathew Arnold

I am an optimist despite the evidence.
- Ivana Elbl

Treason doth never prosper: whats the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
- Sir John Harrington

The appearance of an answer does not mean there is an answer.
- Ivana Elbl

Do as you must for your conscience will not allow you to do otherwise.
- Martin Luther

Remember as you go through life that their are only two things worth knowing. The first is too complex for you to understand and the second is that life is an arbitrary series of often meaningless events, and the only way for you to make sense of life is to forget that you know this.
- George F Walker

"Doom" is the guys equivalent of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."
- Pat Brown

. . . she had enough experience now to make her plans around pessimism rather than hope.
- Mercedes Lackey

Well, in the void where a great tree fell, little trees could climb to reach the sun.
- Mercedes Lackey

The cautious seldom err.
- Confucius

If there was one virtue he possessed, it was patience, for patience was the only virtue that eventually brought rewards.
- Mercedes Lackey

There are only three classes of people who can afford to speak the unvarnished truth -- the very bottom, the very topmost, and children.
- Mercedes lackey

Love, like a cough, cannot be hid.
- Anonymous

God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise.
- John Milton, "Paradise Lost"

He who requires much of himself and little from others will keep himself from being the object of envy.
- Confucius

He who has not faith in others shall find no faith in them.
- Lao Tzu

Forgive servants (or friends) when they offend you. Do not forgive them when the offend others.
- Chen Chiju

He who has never tasted the bitterness of life has never know the sweetness of it all.
- Anonymous

When thoughts arise, then do all things rise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.
- Huang Po

If a great ruler were to acknowledge and follow your advice, be perfectly satisfied. If no one should heed your advice, be the same.
- Mencius

What truly is within shall be manifested without.
- The Great Learning

Everything in the past died yesterday, everything in the future was born today.
- Anonymous

Our bodies are the creation of our minds.
- Chih Kung

When men do not forget what should easily be forgotten, and forget what is not easily forgotten . . . we have a case of real oblivion.
- Chang Tzu

The wise not thinking become foolish, the foolish not thinking become wise.
- Shoo King

The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind.
- Mencius

Ultimate realisation means being free from realisation and the absence of realisation.
- Hui Hai

To see through fame and wealth is to gain a little rest, to see through life and death is to gain a big rest.
- Tut-tut

The wise man, after learning something new, is afraid to learn anything more until he had put his first lesson into practise.
- Tzu Lu

Personal talent coupled with slow temper becomes great talent; wisdom coupled with pacifist min becomes great wisdom.
- Lieh Tzu

You would know politics? Read history!
- Anonymous

Tzu-King asked what constituted the superior man. The Master said, "He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speak according to his actions."
- Confucius

If the one in authority is not enlightened, one can know that those beneath him are in the dark.
- Anonymous

"Assassins!"
- Arturo Toscanini (to his orchestra)

Let the official who has time to spare spend it in study; let the student who has time to spare devote it to public affairs.
- Tzu Hsai

A superior man moved with his lips, a common man moves with his fists.
- Anonymous

A moment's forbearance will preserve your person.
- Inscription on a sword

Store force like drawing a bow, issue force like shooting an arrow.
- Wa Te-seong

A strength of one thousand pounds can be repulsed by four ounces.
- Anonymous

The evil of man is that they like to be teachers of others.
- Mencius

He is a good judge of man who corrects what he hears by what he sees. He who is not a good judge of men corrupts what he sees by what he hears.
- Tut-tut

He who advances may fight, but he who retreats may take care of himself.
- Anonymous

Those who despise money end up sponging on their friends.
- Chang Chao

Not even the cleverest doctors can save themselves.
- Anonymous

He who makes excuses accuses himself.
- French Proverb

It's great to be great, but it's greater to be human.
- Lucy M Montgomery

Sarcasm is the last refuge of a defeated wit.
- Anonymous

Plants surpass man in recognising spring.
- Anonymous

The human brain is a most unusual instrument of elegant and as yet unknown capacity.
- Stuart Lumon Seaton

The heart of the melody can never be put down on paper.
- Pablo Casals

Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done.
- Louis D Brandeis

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
- Benjamin Franklin

Are you going places or just being taken?
- H F Heinrichs

In similar waters, similar fish are found.
- Ruysch

Without our cares, our joys would be less lively.
- Catherine P Trail

Communication is a process of sharing experience 'till it becomes a common possession.
- Josh Dewey

Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.
- William Shakespeare

The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter.
- Anonymous

Genius is initiative on fire.
- Holbrook Jackson

Society is no comfort to one not sociable.
- William Shakespeare

The city has a face, the country has a soul.
- Jaques DeLocrettelle

Wisdom is the art of seeing things invisible.
- Jonathan Swift

Action is the proper fruit of knowledge.
- Thomas Fuller

A friend is a present you give yourself.
- Anonymous

Where you come from is not nearly as important as where you are going.
- Anonymous

The opposite of talking is not listening, the opposite of talking is waiting.
- Fran Lebowitz

Two voices are there; one is the sea, one is the mountains, each a mighty voice.
- William Woodsworth

If the very old will remember, the very young will listen.
- Chief Dan George

Dreams are necessary to life.
- Anais Nin

Patience is the best of all instructors.
- Pubilious Syrus

Where their is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
- Charles F Kettering

The future is today.
- William Osler

The doctrine of the absence of the mind is wrong. Instead we should say the absence of the selfish mind.
- I-Ch'uan

The average person thinks he isn't.
- Father Larry Lorenzoni

Mind has no colour, such as green or yellow, red or white; it is not long or short; it does not vanish or appear; it is free from purity and impurity alike; and its duration is eternal. It is utter stillness.

Such is the form of our original mind, which is also our original body.
- Hui Hai

I think it would be a good idea.
- Mahatma Ghandi (When asked what he thought of Western Civilisation)

Those who dream of the pleasures of drinking may in the morning wail and weep, Those who dream of wailing and weeping may in the morning be going to hunt. When they were dreaming they did not know it was a dream; but when they awoke they knew it was a dream.

Thus it is said that there is a Great Awakening, after which we shall know that this life was a great dream, all the while the stupid people think they are awake.
- Chang Tzu

Be not like those who are ruled by their passions and desires.
- She King

As soon as the mouth is open, evil springs forth. People either neglect the root and speak of the branches, or neglect the reality of the "illusionary" world and speak only of enlightenment.
- Huang Po

Hell is paved with good samaritans.
- William H Holden

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, and suffering is the blessing of the New Testament.
- Francis Bacon

One should always begin with friendship, rather than a more ardent emotion. The former will last, if the latter does not.
- Mercedes Lackey

I do believe in encouraging those of lesser ability, but I think that appointing a congenital idiot to a Council seat is going too far.
- Mercedes Lackey

I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- Voltaire

Each mans freedom is limited by that of his neighbours.
- Dag Hammarsskjold

No one has ever dared to claim that the causes of warfare and the sources of prejudice are ever rational.
- Mercedes Lackey

It is always a good policy to speak the truth -- unless you happen to be an exceptionally good liar.
- Jerome K Jerome

There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny.
- Phillip Pullman, "The Golden Compass"

"We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not," said the witch, "or die of despair."
- Phillip Pullman, "The Golden Compass"

Everything that can be invented, has been invented.
- Charles H Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

Nothing, however, is inevitable and very few things are even predictable.
- David Frum

Numbers mean nothing. It is worth that counts.
- Sundiata

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I was two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
- Abraham Lincoln

Griots know the history if kings and kingdoms and that is why they are the best councillors for kings,. Every king wants to have a singer to perpetuate his memory, for it is the griot who rescues the memories of kings from oblivion, as men have short memories. Kings have prescribed destinies just like men, and seers who probe the future know this. They have knowledge of the future, whereas we griots are depositories for the knowledge of the past. but whoever knows the history of a country can read its future.
- D T Niane ( from the "Oral story of the Malinkes")

Things usually become cliched precisely because there's a grain of truth in them.
- Mercedes Lackey, "Magic's Price"

I mistrust perfection. I keep waiting for something to go wrong.
- Mercedes Lackey, "Magic's Price"

"Is power not freedom?" the cat asked Catseye.
"No."
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
He does to himself.
- Chief Seattle, 1854.

One is as subtle as rape.
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

Begin at the beginning, and go till you come to the end: the stop.
- Lewis Carrol

Every process is partially or totally inferred with by chance,
- Carl Gustavus Jung

The minister had not set out to be a traitor. He had merely put his ambitions before his integrity, and circumstances had done the rest.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

Suicide is about alienation. There are other ways to show society you're pissed off. And there is a lot about our society to piss people off.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

Before, I fought purely for money. Now I have higher ideas. I fight for democracy and money.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

"What does democracy mean to you?" ...
"Freedom to make more money."
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

It came to him that if you are the kind of person who turns over stones -- and most people learn not to early in life -- what comes crawling out can be disconcerting.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

There are no coincidences. We think they're coincidences because our model of the world doesn't account for them. We're tied up in cause and effect.
- Carl Jung

The distance is nothing. It is the first step that is difficult.
- Marquise de Deffand (concerning the legend that St Denis, carrying his head in his hands, walked two leagues)

Innocence has novelty, but experience has performance.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

There were too many people wanting to much in too small a space. Really, killing a few people was for the long term good. Mother mature needed some supporting firepower. He decided to give some money to Greenpeace, too. He had no desire to spend his retirement building up his radioactivity level so that he could read at night by the glow. besides, he liked whales.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

Nature abhors equilibrium.
- Ivanna Elbl

Nature abhors an ideological vacuum as much as it does any other kind.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

"If everyone minded there own business," said the Duchess with a hoarse growl, "the world would go around a great deal faster than it does."
- Lewis Carrol

It is better to be a small shrimp on the sea of faith than a dead whale on the beach.
- Margaret Craven.

There were two kinds of naiveté, one not even aware of the problems, and another which had knocked on all the doors of knowledge and knows man can explain little, and is willing to follow his convictions into the unknown.
- Schweitzer

History doesn't teach us a damn thing. Historians teach us.
- J Driscoll

Does the bow fear the arrow?
- Crawford Killian

" . . . if I held you by your heels from a third-story window, you would have a problem." . . .
:"I do not think so. If you saved me, all would be well. If you dropped me, nothing would matter. It is you who has the problem."
- Margaret Craven, "I Heard an Own Call my Name"

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridges to cross and which to burn.
- David Russel

The reward of suffering is experience.
- Aeschylus

There was pride in his eyes without arrogance. Behind the pride was a sadness do seep it seemed to stretch back to ancient mysteries Mark could not even imagine, and he felt a small thrill of fear, or anticipation, which a man knows if he's lucky enough to meet and recognise his challenge.
- Margaret Craven, "I Heard an Own Call my Name"

He did not know that when he turned back in his own eyes was the depth of sadness which he had begun to understand.
- Margaret Craven, "I Heard an Own Call my Name"

The city of Cork, Ireland's second largest, had been sacked, burned, pillaged, looted and destroyed so often since its foundation in the sixth century by St Finabar that now it seemed laid out with the primary objective of stopping any invader in his tracks.

Its traffic problem was impressive in its turgid complexity, and on a dark,, wet March evening it had reached a pinnacle of congestion that was a tribute to the ingenuity of its corporation's planning committee.

Fitzduane had a manic private theory that the reason the city's population had expanded was that none of the inhabitants could get out, and so they stayed and become traders, or lawyers or pregnant, or both and conversed in a strange singsong that sounded to the uninitiated like a form of Chinese but was, in fact, the Cork accent.

Fitzduane actually quite liked Cork, but he could never understand how a city that stood astride one river could have so many bridges -- all, apparently, going in the wrong direction In addition, there seemed to be more bridges than during his last visit, and some seemed to be in different locations. Maybe they were designed to move silently in the dead of night. Maybe the reason the British had burned the city -- yet again -- in 1921 was just to find a parking space.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

"Many of my customers are fished out of the river," said Buckley. "Cork people do so like to drown themselves. We had so many drownings last year that one of the mortuary attendants suggested building a special quay for suicides and supplying them with marker buoys and anchors."

"I guess it's the parking problem," said Fitzduane
- Victor O'Reilly, "Games of the Hangman"

How many men of England died to prove they were not dead?
- G K Chesteron (0n the English who died in the Great War)

Your daughter in your enemy's camp is your enemy.
- Crawford Killian

Hope was a weapon she had not expected him to use against her.
- Tara K Harper, "Lightwing"

The key to magic is magic; to be a mage you must be a mage.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

Since I'm burning all by bridges, it would be nice to know which side of the river I'll end up on when the smoke clears.
- Tara K Harper, "Lightwing"

Jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

Do you cling to the little joys because you are afraid to taste the great ones, Jenny Waynest?
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

They said that dragons did not entrap with lies but with the truth, and she knew he had read accurately the desire of her soul.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

The key to magic in not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in the having, but in the giving and doing -- in loving and in being loved.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

What man has created, man can destroy, and bring to light that day of joy.
- Anonymous

What you feel is the love of humans, and that is a poor trade for the power that the touch of your mind gave me. It is what I first learned from John -- both the pain and the fact that to feel it is better than not to be able to feel.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

We change what we touch, be it magic, power or another life.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

Grief closed her throat, the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, or songs unsung -- the human grief of choice.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

Having so little, we share among ourselves to make any of it worth having. We do what we do because the consequences of not caring enough to do it would be worse.
- Barbara Hambly, "Dragonsbane"

Wit is educated insolence.
- Aristotle

You do not know yourself; how then can I tell you things you may otherwise wish to know?
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

I speak the truth, Prince Elad. Listen with more than your ears.
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

O gods, die with us, do not survive us!
O crimes, where are your promises?
O mother's sins, find the door in the fallen ruins!
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

I speak for the gods, the gods do not explain. You must explain for yourself. All is not what it seems; what things seem is not all. It is not the mirrors reflection that is real, but what it reflects. It is not the sword that slays, but the man behind it. It is not the wall that weakens, but those behind who do not repair it. The tree that stands in the forest reaches for the sunlight but cannot live without its roots. Temper your sword, Prince Elad. Nourish your roots. See beneath your mirror.
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

Deep, where unending pain causes an end to pain -- low, where the ceaseless cries reduce themselves to whispers -- soft, where torment finds knowledge . . .
In the hall of darkness where there is no light, no light, no light . . .
. . . a light will grow . . .
. . . to make the darkness darker still . . .
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

Shall I tell you the future holds only truth, Prince Elad?
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

O Time, your face his human.
O Death, your name is man.
O Humanity, reducing strong elements to dust, your name is blown on a tempest, you frighten the stars, you are ever young, but old, and ignorant as some force of nature.
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

Trapped on earth, trapped by hope and memories, where is our answer, if not within ourselves?
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

He is the vessel, and he is all the vessel contains.
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

"I did not want this. Not this life -- not this pain. There is a limit to what humanity can endure."
"You'd think there must be."
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

These things that come, they come with cause.
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

You are becoming your destiny, O man. You are the chosen, the vessel, the being, the embodiment of the last days. Demand that shadows bow before you and mountains bend in praise, for you are becoming your destiny, O man beyond men, O Prince of Darkness, Master of the Hell of Men!
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

"These pains have come, so awesome, because we have refused our deep secret, and we cannot share or understand what we refuse.
"Orain, live with this -- I go with this -- the gods are within us. We are the gods We are their masters, and we are very poor masters, poor masters indeed, of the gods and of ourselves . . .
- David C Smith, "Master of Evil"

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr

Without contraries, there is no progression.
- William Blake

If poems do not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, they should not come at all.
- Keats

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.
- Pearl S Buck

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Syndey J Harris

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
- Voltaire

Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them.
- Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because they want to do it.
- Dwight Eisenhower

Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.
- John C Maxwell

Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.
- Ernie Kovaes

Recently I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who had made a mistake costing the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,00 training him. Why would I want someone to hire his experience?
- Thomas Watson

No man means all he says, yet few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.
- Henry Adams

The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.
- Alexandre Jablokov

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
- Albert Camus

Virtue is insufficient temptation.
- George Bernard Shaw

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
- Thomas Jefferson

Human rights begin with breakfast.
- Leopold Senghor

"One man one vote" is meaningless unless accompanied by the principle of "One man one bread."
- Anonymous

Life does not cease to be funny when people die anymore than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
- George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
- George Bernard Shaw

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
- Blaise Pascal

We should be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence. -- on pain of liquidation.
- George Bernard Shaw

In the long run, we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keats

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
- Confucius

Architecture is frozen music.
- Goethe

The factory of the future will have to employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
- Warren Benis

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Darkwind is fully human, You are not. You are clever, intelligent, resourceful, but you are not human. Therefore you must appear to be better than humans.
- Mercedes Lackey

If the world saw a beast -- the world would kill a beast. It was not fair, but very little in Nyara's life had ever been fair. At least this was understandable. Predictable.
- Mercedes Lackey

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow.
- Horace

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
- Edmund Burke

If I have seen father than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulder's of giants.
- Issac Newton

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway.
- Thoreau

There is no god.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough.
- Edna Milay

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III

If you choose not to decide -- you still have made a choice.
- Neil Pert

I haven't a clue as to how my story will end. But that's all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, you don't conclude that the road has vanished . . . how else could we discover the stars?
- Unknown

These days the wages of sin depend upon what kind of deal you make with the devil.
- Kars Vichko

The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.
- Anonymous

No man is an island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine . . . any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
- John Donne

If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.
- Old Yiddish Proverb

Don't wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.
- Albert Camus

Man will not be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
- Denis Diderot

If there was no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
- Voltaire

Hell is other people.
- Jean-Paul Sarte

If their is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult that religion.
- Goncourt

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem that it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
- David Freidman

Never deprive someone of hope -- it may be all they have.
- Unknown

Men stumble over the truth from time to time but most pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
- Winston Churchill

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
- Albert Einstein

All the miseries of life stem from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone.
- Blaise Pascal

Against boredom, even the gods contend in vain.
- Neitzsche

I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun -- not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
- C S Lewis

Every man alone is sincere; at the entrance of a second man hypocrisy begins.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith but through striving after rational knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Even in the presence of others, he was completely alone.
- Robert Persig

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies, for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
- Thomas De Quincy

Language has created the world loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
- Paul Tillich

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Mahatma Ghandi

Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty to all things. You can not do more. You should not wish to do less.
- Robert Lee

He who has lost honour can lose nothing else.
- Publilius Syrus

Dignity does not consist of possessing honours, but of deserving them.
- Aristotle

There was one who thought himself above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.
- Elbert Hubbard

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
- Herman Hesse

The strongest man on earth is he who stands alone.
- Henrik Ibsen

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bed of a child deathly sick.
- Coleridge

Everything has been figured our, except how to live.
- Jean-Paul Satre

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a spark in the darkness of mere being.
- Carl Jung

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed on him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
- Mikhail Bakunin

Without music, life would be a mistake.
- Neitzsche

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who weeps: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
- Neitzsche

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.
- Neitzsche

Man is condemned to be free, because once thrown into this world, he is responsible for everything he does.
- Jean-Paul Satre

There is no reality except the one contained within me.
- Herman Hesse

The heart has its own reason which reason does not know.
- Blaise Pascal

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
- Fydor Dastoeusky

Woman was God's second mistake.
- Neitzsche

People might die, but the world went on. One had to be philosophical. People killing each other was not globally threatening, like destroying the ozone layer. It was actually quite normal. But it was inconvenient for those involved.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

Power abhors a vacuum.
- Victor O'Reilly

The best eulogies, now that he thought about it, were delivered at weddings, retirements, firings, and funerals. It was a depressing observation about the human condition. And did weddings really belong in this group of essentially negative transitorial occasions. He thought they did -- although undoubtedly most participants regarded themselves as exceptions.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

Duas uncias in pacta mortalis est.
(Two inches in the right spot is fatal.)
- Roman saying about why using a sword as a thrusting weapon is better than using it as a stabing weapon

My father was a politician and the son of a politician. This makes a joke of democracy but is not so unusual.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

It had come down to an elemental reality: Destroy or be destroyed.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

Reality was an empty apartment.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

Cover-ups were not confined to Watergate. In the real world of big government and big business, they were the norm. Exposure was an exception. The price was just a cost of doing business.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

You shut out the sadness and you did what had to be done, and only afterwards did you weep. That was the way of it. There was no other.
- Victor O'Reilly, "Rules of the Hunt"

Seeing people get blown apart is a great stress reliever.
- J. David Caldwell

Then Hitler must have been under a lot of stress.
- Stacey Ste. Marie

Most of the world is lonely corners.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

This was America, damn it, where you could solve any problem with a screwdriver and a wrench, or with a computer, or with fists and a handgun, or at worst with the help of a therapist and a twelve-step program to effect personal enlightenment and change.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Reality is perception. Perception change. Reality is fluid. So if by "reality" you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there's no such thing.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Whatever you expect is what will be, so simply change your expectations.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Sometimes enlightenment came only when it wasn't sought or welcomed.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Is any of us really anything?
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

We're anything in the sense that we are everything.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Everything is more than it seems, but nothing is as mysterious as it appears to be.
- Dean Koontz, 'Tick Tock"

Do, or do not. There is no try.
- Yoda

What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy? A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of the truth, cloaca of uncertainy and error, the glory and shame of the universe.
- Blaise Pascal

There's nothing like being able to legitimately Pass the responsibility.
- Mercedes Lackey

. . . if we can't see them, they must be there.
- Mercedes Lackey

To put it bluntly, my friend, you are ridding out into wolf territory with a young and tender lamb at your side. And the wolves look convincingly like sheep.
- Mercedes Lackey

If this is a trial of my abilities -- the gods have no sense of proportion.
- Mercedes Lackey

It is not wise to dispute the decisions of the Powers. . . . They have more ways of enforcement than you have of escape.
- Mercedes Lackey

. . . it was from teaching, he maintained, that all other professions were made possible.
- T M Wright

The curse of this "gift" is that I have it.
- T M Wright

It makes a person feel so . . . insignificant, he thought, and wondered what appeal there was in being made to feel insignificant. He decided it made his mistakes in life seem insignificant. In the great and grand scheme of things, it made him somehow blameless.
- T M Wright

Reason is not sufficient for the defence of reason.
- Max Harkheimer

. . . we should better employ cunning than courage.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

I did not know how I felt when I first slew a man, only that I wanted very badly to live.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

"The universe is perfect," Ryerson said. "It works, so it's perfect. And there is nothing -- anywhere -- that says we have to understand it.
- T M Wright

He, Frederick Dunn, had discovered what no one else anywhere had discovered, that he was a living, breathing fragment of the universe that swallowed galaxies whole.

He was a part of God.
- T M Wright

It was odd, but he felt spiritual. Cosmic. At one with the universe. The universe, after all, was as murderous as he -- it swallowed stars, it ate galaxies, and he had absorbed some of that. It wasn't a need, it was reality -- the only reality, too, because it lasted forever. And he had absorbed a piece of it. All humans could. Some others had, and they were well known to history.
- T M Wright

How should you apologise for another?
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

It is always so? Must we always find our truths in blood?
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

His voice was low and husky, empty of inflection in that way men have when they conceal anguish. Let us not disgrace ourselves with exhibition of weakling pain. Or is it only that we cannot handle it any other way, save that denial of it.
- Angus Wells , "Lords of the Sky"

I looked around and saw the sky all filled with dragons, dread squadrons come out of legend to fall upon a younger world.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

Power corrupts, but its usage can be most enjoyable.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
- William Woodsworth

Blood's memory dies hard.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

What you did was friendship's duty, and I think there's likely no greater love than that.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

Death and life run in cycles, no? One dies, one is born: life continues and pain abates.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

I think that perhaps their is only one god: time. The ager who takes us all.
- Angus Wells, "Lords of the Sky"

Why let stupidity stand in your way? Nothing else has.
- Tara K Harper

Love is learning to pay attention.
- Anonymous

The eye -- it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, wheree'er they be,
Against or with our will.
- William Woodsworth

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself may come,
But we must still be seeking?
- William Woodsworth

One impulse from a vernal wood
Can teach you more of man,
Of morals evils and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- William Woodsworth

In no respect can contraries be true.
- Christopher Marlowe

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
- William Woodsworth

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep.
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- William Woodsworth

Liberty is the right to choose. Freedom is the result of choice.
- Anonymous

If one has not given everything, one has given nothing.
- Georges Guymener

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats.
- Russian Proverb

All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it.
- Samuel Butler

Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life.
- Joe Clark

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The longing of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyed. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once . . .
- William Woodsworth

. . . Therefore I am still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all we behold
From this green earth, of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive . . .
- William Woodsworth

Death is on all sides.
- An old motto

Now I am not good by conscious intent, but have been so trained by habit that I cannot only act rightly but am unable to act any other than rightly.
- Seneca

Smile: it'll make people wonder what you are up to.
- Heather Daye

Then giggle uncontrollably; it'll confuse them.
- Heather Daye

Must! 'tis somewhat hard, when kings must go.
- Christopher Marlowe

Milk: it does a condom good.
- Heather Daye

Can you in your words make show of amity
And in your shields display your rancorous minds?
- Christopher Marlowe

I know, my lord, many will stomach me,
But I respect neither their love nor hate.
- Christopher Marlowe

Mine honour shall be hostage of my truth;
If that will not suffice, farewell my lords.
- Christopher Marlowe

You cannot force peace.
- Tara K Harper

I thank you all, my lords, than I perceive,
That heading is one, and hanging is the other,
And death is all.
- Christopher Marlowe

To die, sweet Spencer, therefore live we all.
Spencer, all live to die and rise to fall.
- Christopher Marlowe

Wither you will, all places are alike
And every earth is fit for burial.
- Christopher Marlowe

I know not, but of this I am assured
That death ends all and I can die but once.
- Christopher Marlowe

The griefs of private men are soon allayed
But not those of kings.
- Christopher Marlowe

But what are kings when regiment is gone
But perfect shadows on a sunshine day?
- Christopher Marlowe

"A slaves road," she said finally. "A road where my soul dies a bit each day and my feet keep moving so that another's heart may beat."
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

"What god," she snarled, suddenly vicious, "gives you the right to make me guilty of anothers crime?"
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

"I am enchained but am no slave."
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

"Do you not realise child -- " She touched Tsia's cheek gently " -- that guilt is the only piece of your soul they cannot take away?"
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

And when I give up my humanity and become no more than a tool to be used, then I am a slave.
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

You cannot throw your worth away simply because you no longer want it. Worth is not the same as will.
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

I'm not at a fork in the road, I'm at an eggbeater in the road.
- Thom Fitzgerald

"You want to kill him? . . . Kill your own child first."
- Tara K Harper, "Cat Scratch Fever"

In conclusion, Mr Speaker, let us remember that democracy is a precious thing, but it is merely a means and not an end. It is what we do in this place, [the House of Commons] not the fact that we are in this place, that transforms shared values into actions.
- Joe Jordan, MP

If you want to catch the devil you have to play with the sinners.
- Anonymous

It's far better to shovel a ton of shit than eat a grain of it.
- Irish Proverb

Maybe someone should teach him the difference between humility and dignity.
- Paul Lindsay

Ability has nothing to do with opportunity.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Behind an able man are always other able men.
- Chine Proverb

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, what healing thoughts
Of tender joy, will thou remember me. . . .
- William Woodsworth

The difficulty of life lies in the choice.
- George Moore

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
- Goethe

Too many of us, when we accomplish what we set out to do, we exclaim: "See what I have done!" instead of saying, "See where I have led."
- Henry Ford

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notion.
- Charles F Kettering

All worthwhile men have good thoughts, good ideas and good intentions -- but precious few of them translate them to actions.
- John Hancock Field

There is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court.
- Clarence Darrow

Many persons wonder why they never amount to more than they do, have good stuff in them, energetic, persevering, and have ample opportunities. It is all a case of trimming the useless branches and throwing the whole force of power into the development of something that counts.
- Walter J Johnson

If the questions were easy, I'd be at the library looking up the answers.
- Paul Lindsay

War is one of those scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men.
- Cardinal Richelieu

As twisted as a criminals mind becomes, business is a universally accepted reason from not seeking revenge.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

BELIEVE IN THE LORD AND HE SHALL DELIVER.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

DON'T CONFUSE GOD WITH DOMINO'S.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

I guess if you were ever charged with necrophillia, that would be the perfect defence: I didn't know they were dead. I thought I was having sex with a civil servant.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

They were discovering who they were, which, while occasionally frustrating, was a fascinating passage to witness.
- Paul Lindsay , "Code name: Gentkill"

. . . even the best tools have built homes that have slid into the ocean.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

Success would not come from intelligent deduction; rather, it would be a result of outlasting the obstacles.
- Paul Lindsay, "Code name: Gentkill"

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
- Henry David Thoreau

Hang up and Drive.
- Bumper Sticker

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
- Denis Wholey

Even when hope and science fail us, art survives.
- Janet Maslin

Dope dealers killing dope dealers. There's natural selection.
- Paul Lindsay

Into every life a little rain must fall.
- Paul Lindsay

A life of "almost" brings it's own reward.
- Diane Duane

I can live without the Power, but not without friends.
- Diane Duane

. . . very few people want what they need.
- Diane Duane

"You walk on water, and complain that you can't find anything to drink!"
- Diane Duane

The judgement of ultimate power didn't frighten them; they were prepared to meet the infinite eye to eye and judge right back.
- Diane Duane

You cannot depend on yourself if you cannot first trust others.
- Diane Duane

Never close a door until you've walked through it.
- Sam MacLeod

Power tests Power, always.
- Diane Duane

Mad the king might have been, but paranoia has its uses.
- Diane Duane

The Shadow was the first to claim it was right, and ever since them the claim has been suspect. For the Goddess didn't need to claim, She knew.
- Diane Duane

Fight with all your power, to the death, and lose the battles first. Learn defeat. Then you get everything. Win, and lose it all.
- Diane Duane

Those who say we are made in the Goddess's image, they say true. For She made the world, yet in the heat of Her creation forgot the Shadow of Death that lurked, waiting its chance: and unthinking She bound it into the world, and now rues Her doing. And we, like Her, make works that we fancy shall last forever, but leave this or that great matter our of our reckoning; and then rue the mistake after. Here, though, we come at last by Her mercy to differ. For this mistakes we make, we can set right. She, never. All the hosts of man must come to the Last Shore before She may end the world and begin anew. Yet though we may set our mistakes aright . . . how often do we so? And in this the Shadow's laughter may he heard. In our pride and blindness is Its only hope . . . and the means by which the likeness between us and Her is made complete.
- Diane Duane

The business of Power is to be in the world, working in it, being of use.
- Diane Duane

"If you have to ask," Ferrant said, "explaining it wouldn't help."
- Diane Duane

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
- Marie Curie

Do not defeat yourself! Let someone else do it for you.
- Anonymous

It makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as part of the drama, or cloaks himself in authority.
- Carl Jung

" . . . this also," said Marlowe suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

"Madness is not an explanation, Olivia."
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful. It told him that there was nothing in the whole wide world of madness that was not the property of sanity as well.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

There comes a moment when even the dark will not hide what is there. She had reached that moment -- and could not walk through. She wanted -- more than anything -- light.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
- G K Chesteron

Kurtz said: "it tells us who we are, Marlow. Each and every one of us. That is the wonder of it."
Yes. And the horror.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

. . . his dreams must have seemed to close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him -- somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city . . .
- F Scott Fitzgerald

To live and breathe is nothing . . . to want to live and breathe is everything.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"If her head explodes, does company insurance cover it?"
- on "Traders"

If it is just us [out there] it seems like an awful waste of space.
- in "Contact"

First rule of government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
- in "Contact"

In all our searching the only thing we have found to make the loneliness more bearable is each other.
- in "Contact"

You will be destroyed by a love greater than the hatred that compels you.
- David C Smith

Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well. Think about it.
- Elias Schwartz

Everything you can imagine is real.
- Picasso

Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival.
- W Edwards Demming

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
- Confucius

We should consider every day lost in which we have not laughed at least once. And we should call every truth false that was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
- Neitzsche

The man has missed something who has not left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
- Gustave Flaubert

For what purpose humanity is there should not concern us: why you are these, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them. I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and impossible.
- Neitzsche

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
- H L Mencken

The search for truth is more important that its possession.
- Albert Einstein

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerged and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
- Blaise Pascal

We are what we pretend to be, but we better be very careful what we pretend.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Between the wishing and the thing lies the waiting.
- Anonymous

No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
- Abraham Lincoln

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcom Forbes

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
- Muslim Proverb

Ethics is not definable, it is not implementable, because it is not conscious; it involves not only our thinking, but also our feeling.
- Valdemar Setzer

Learn to live . . . forget . . . and learn again.
- Anonymous

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.
- Slovenian Proverb

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

There is pain, he thought, that no one should be made to witness.
- Timothy Findley

But a living is not a life.
- Robin Hobb

Just because a man can do a thing does not mean he should do a thing.
- Robin Hobb

We do no great things; only small things with great love.
- Mother Teresa

If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.
- Anonymous

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
- Ann Landers

Men are ordained to live in misery . . .
- Christopher Marlowe

We shall live! The music is so gay, so joyful, and it seems as though a little more and we shall know what we are living for, why we are suffering . . . If we only knew -- if we only knew!
- Anton Checkov

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
- Marshal McLuhan

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
- Bernadette Devlin

Natives who beat drums to ward off evil are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
- Mary Kelly

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
- Bob Edwards

Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
- Will Rogers

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- William Shakespeare

The more you know, the less you need to show.
- Anonymous

It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion.
- Unknown

It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken way from you.
- M Grundler

No arrow shot at a target is ever wasted, no matter how many break.
- Mercedes Lackey

There is a great deal we never get used to. We simply cease to show our discomfort.
- Mercedes Lackey

If it gets caught, it deserves to be eaten -- to be appreciated, used entirely and with respect, and not robbed of something stupid, like a tail-feather, and discarded as useless.
- Mercedes Lackey

Worrying over fairness can sometimes impede justice, and that in itself is not fair.
- Mercedes Lackey

Whatever is prepared for never occurs.
- Mercedes Lackey

It is easy to regard someone who is dead as without peer.
- Mercedes Lackey

It is no boast when it is fact.
- Mercedes Lackey

. . . in searching for Truths, he'd found few absolute ones and thousands of personal ones.
- Mercedes Lackey

It is painful to advert these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost. . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.
- Col. Thomas Aspinwall

The Europeans were able to conquer America, not because of their military genius, or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed. They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare.
- Howard Simpson

"Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?"
- Ursula Le Guin

What is any war but a massacre?
- Janny Wurts

The gift was never given, but claimed.
- Janny Wurts

. . . you have only the present in your power.
- Janny Wurts

You can call me by my first name. I'm not really important so you don't have to treat me with any respect.
- Bruce Cater, Economics Professor

Power by itself has no morals.
- Janny Wurts

. . . no male alive has ever dealt the last word.
- Janny Wurts

No defeat is ever final.
- Janny Wurts

Is winning or losing all you understand? Then I pity you. Whether or not you'll cede the point is quite moot. I charge you instead. Learn by what you saw and take fair warning.
- Janny Wurts

I exploited what faults you presented to hand.
- Janny Wurts

I'm just learning this. I think I've mastered it.
- David Caldwell

. . . shadow does not necessarily conceal evil; it merely conceals. This is a perception that goes beyond ordinary human understanding and spirituality.
- Katherine Kurtz

Olivia closed her eyes. "I thought you said something about human sensibilities," she said.
"I did," said Marlow. "Human -- not humane."
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

. . . a person possessed of reason must appear to be sane at all times.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

Why are all bright creatures doomed?
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

I would never not be I, she was thinking, But I would gladly, this night, have been born some other I, not mad.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"You have failed to understand. It is not who are you? -- but are you?
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

Psychiatric case loads everywhere carried alarming numbers. Broken dreamers, their minds in ruin. This was the human race.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

The more one sees, he had written to his late friend Borges, the more one prays for blindness. It was a state that had not been accorded Fagan -- but a curse that had blighted the life of the great Argentinean writer. Borges had responded to Fagan's despair by reminding him that pulling down the shades does not shut out the world. It merely shuts out the light.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

There is little beauty left -- but much ugliness. Little wilderness -- but much emptiness. No explorers -- but many exploiters. There is no art -- no music -- no literature -- but only entertainment. And there is no philosophy. This that was once a living place for humankind has become their killing ground.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

. . . all we have is this. Less light. More darkness.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"All books are a conjuring, Miss Kemp." he said. "That is the more precise description I can give. They are a conjuring of humankind and the world we inhabit. Conrad was not the first to conjure Kurtz -- and not the last. he was merely the first to give him that name.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

Civilisation -- sickened -- has itself become a plague.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

The human race cannot take a single step, but it produces another Kurtz. He is the darkness in us all.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

We are lost, he was thinking, because we savour too keenly the brightness of the moment as it reflects upon our selves.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

Nothing changes.
Just the methods.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

There is weird power in a spoken word . . .And a word carries far -- very far -- deals destruction thought time as bullets go plying through space.
- Joseph Conrad. "Lord Jim"

Sometimes a man does not know how badly he is hurt until someone else probes the wound.
- Robin Hobb

Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's world.
- Robin Hobb

Maybe I needed to get free of him. Of al he'd done for me, even when I didn't want him to do it. He has to stop doing things I can never pay him back for. Things no man should do for another, sacrifices no man should make for another man.
- Robin Hobb

I had not meant to speak of such things. I had intended to drive him away, not cut him to the bone.
- Robin Hobb

"Burrich. What I said to you earlier, I was angry, I was . . ."
"Right on target." The sound he made might have been a laugh, if it had not been so freighted with bitterness.
"Only in the way that people who know one another best know how to hurt one another best." I pleaded.
- Robin Hobb

"I killed people as a boy. It didn't make me a man. Nor you."
- Robin Hobb

It is quite one thing to admit a fault to yourself. It is another thing entirely to have a friend not only agree with you, but point out the full depth of the fault.
- Robin Hobb

I would kill Regal
It only seemed fair. He had killed me first.
- Robin Hobb

"You would probably say that I have found someone else to look after. Perhaps I have. Perhaps its time to give that where it is truly needed."
- Robin Hobb

It is good to know well a man you are going to kill; it is not good to understand him.
- Robin Hobb

But a wall that will not yield to a battering ram can still be breached by a gentle twinning of ivory.
- Robin Hobb

I wondered if anyone, anywhere, got to live the life he wanted.
- Robin Hobb

There is not any memory with less satisfaction that the memory of some temptation we resisted.
- James Campbell

Perhaps we cannot prevent the world from being one where children are tortured. But we can prevent the number of tortured children.
- Albert Camus

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We come and go just like ripples in a stream.
- John Politis

There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
- Lou Reed

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
- Stuarts Law of Retroaction

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
- Salvor Hardin

Life is made up of marbles and mud.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
- Henry Ford

The worst prison would be a closed mind.
- Anonymous

That which is static and repetitive is boring That which is dynamic is random and confusing. In between lies art.
- John Locke

Simply the thing that I am shall make me live.
- William Shakespeare

Confidence is nonsense is a necessary requirement of the creative process.
- Anonymous

The man who removes mountains begins by carrying away small stones.
- Anonymous

Use soft words and hard arguments.
- Anonymous

The quality of an organisation can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.
- Harold McAlladon

If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.
- Larry Leisner

Education is but a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durrant

Good people are good because they come to wisdom through failure.
- William Saroyan

It is one thing to be willing to die for another. It is another to sacrifice the living of one's life for another.
- Robin Hobb

I think I made a better boy than I do a man.
- Robin Hobb

. . . it is in each of us to be a catalyst in our own time.
- Robin Hobb

A catalyst was DarAles for his time, a changer of hearts and lives. He came not to be a hero, but to enable the hero in others. he came not to fulfil prophecies, but to open the door to new futures. Such is ever the task of a catalyst.
- Robin Hobb

No one truly understands a prophecy until it comes true.
- Robin Hobb

I learned long ago not to blame myself for evils done to me.
- Robin Hobb

. . . prophets shape their prophecies to be true after the fact.
- Robin Hobb

Sometimes all the choices are poor ones . . . and still a man must choose.
- Robin Hobb

"You can have my death, if that's what it takes. More than that, you can have my life, Chade. But not my child's. Not my daughters."
-Robin Hobb

Too few folk in the world cared for me. I could not hate even one of them.
- Robin Hobb

I do not confuse what was done to you with who you are.
- Robin Hobb

I felt it was a weakness in myself that I could not find the strength of will to hate him.
- Robin Hobb

When you can either laugh of cry, you might as well laugh.
- Anonymous

I was testing to the limits Burrich's theory that while drinking could solve nothing, it could make the unbearable tolerable. It did not seem to be working for me. The more I drank, the less tolerable my situation seemed. And the more intolerable I because to my friends.
- Robin Hobb

Yes, and fire makes you warmer, right up until the time it burns you.
- Robin Hobb

"There is one thing in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attack to what gender one is."

"Well, it is important . . ." I began

"Rubbish!" He exclaimed. "Mere plumbing, when all is said and done. Why is it important?"
- Robin Hobb

Honour and courtesy and justice . . . they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are not shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.
- Robin Hobb

Not all things need to be told. Not all things should be told.
- Robin Hobb

You can make it without friends, but with them you can do anything.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Loyalty unreturned is only service.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Those are the worst kind of enemies. The ones you don't know you have.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

The second worst kind of enemies are those who can poison your supplies without you knowing it.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Luck, Nightfall thought, is a matter of opinion.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

A fool fears nothing and calls it courage. A hero conquers what he fears.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Honour loses meaning in the face of starvation and pain.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Those who claimed to be the most pious and devoid of sin veiled souls without conscience and deeds of greed and cruelty they justified as God's will.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

It was the most evil of men who generally believed themselves most good.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Morality, like laws, can't cover every situation.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Where you feel most secure, you are in the most danger. No place is certain sanctuary.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

Whenever the answer seems too obvious, look to the source of your information.
- Mickey Reichert, 'The Legend of Nightfall"

The most useful alliances are frequently unlikely.
- Cheryl Franklin

"Could you do anything without deviousness?"
"It has happened on occasion. Simplicity itself can be a very misleading technique.
- Cheryl Franklin

The spaceport has been destroyed, or, to be more precise, it has been removed from a three dimensional context.
- Cheryl Franklin

The value of an object lies not it its perfections but in the uniqueness of its imperfections.
- Cheryl Franklin

The bitterness ended when I realised that I was simple a lesser tool of economics, and the surest means of escaping a tool's fate was to become one of those who could afford to buy tools of his own.
- Cheryl Franklin

We were the most powerful free people in the world, and to possess power imposes the obligation to use it on behalf of the weak.
- William Thayer

Legend is not truth.
- Cheryl Franklin

My son, you will be surprised with how little wisdom the world is governed.
- Axel Oxenstein

War is not an independent and self-sufficient agency, but merely the continuation of policy by other means.
- Clausewitz

I would infinitely prefer madness to the knowledge that my suspicions were true.
- Barbara Hambly

The dark, strangely coloured eyes were terrible to behold.

He had seen that look in Ingold's eyes. She had knowledge she would give everything to unknown, had seen what she could never unsee. Closing her eyes, she folded her fist into a white-and-blue hammer and beat it slowly, angrily, on the flawless white wall. As if she could change what she knew would come, could break the wall of what must be.
- Barbara Hambly

Of what use is power, if not to give you a good living?
- Barbara Hambly

Men not only kill the messenger who brings the bad news, but also the horse he rode on.
- Barbara Hambly

What the hell do you think businessmen are but gangsters with their bowels cut out of them?
- Barbara Hambly

"Goodness knows how she made her living; several mornings I saw her through my office window picking through the garbage bins and had to summon my servants to take her away.

"Why?" Sunwolf demanded curiously. "Were you planning to sell the garbage?"
- Barbara Hambly

. . . it was an ill wind indeed that blew nobody good.
- Barbara Hambly

I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names, he trembles as I do.
- Weillington, on examining the roster of officers assigned to him for the 1810 campaign in Portugal

With love and patience, nothing is impossible.
- Daisuka Heda

. . . imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms . . .
- Jane Austen

It was not without good reason that the agelong experience of simple people teaches that beggary and prison are ills none can be safe from.
- Anton Chekov

No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.
- Turkish Proverb

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26, 911 words.
- David McIntosh

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite if ourselves.
- Victor Hugo

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George S Patton

If you see a snake, just kill it.. Don't appoint a committee on snakes.
- H Ross Perot

Not hearing makes one helplessly egocentric.
- Jean Stafford

I had a lot of scars. The worst ones didn't show.
- Joan D Vinge

'Tell her I know that everything is going to be all right. I know it not because I am naive but because I still have faith in the kindness of life." He could not help thinking that it was will instead of faith that put those words in her mouth.
- Jean Stafford

And one of the hard truths I'd learned since then was that not being invisible meant that everyone got to see you naked.
- Joan D Vinge

Mark understood what it meant to be human . . . to be flawed.

Marx thought he also understood how to end an eternity of human suffering and injustice: share what you could, keep only what you need. He never understood why the rest of humanity couldn't see the answer, when it was so obvious to him.

The truth was that they couldn't even see the problem.
- Joan D Vinge

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
- Friedrich von Schiller

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
- W C Fields

No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.
- John Locke

The first rule in tinkering is to save all the parts.
- Paul Erlich

Hell, there are no rules here -- we're trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison

Usability is like oxygen -- you never notice it until its missing.
- Anonymous

Wine is bottled poetry.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
- Neitzsche

He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them.
- Chinese Proverb

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. Its not.
- Dr Seuss

Whatever you do may be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
- Mahatma Ghandi

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing whats right.
- Issac Asimov

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.
- Socrates

And knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.
- Socrates

The greatest oak was once a little nut that held its ground.
- Anonymous

Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

When did I realise I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realised I was talking to myself.
- Peter O'Toole, "The Ruling Class"

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas had better be prepared to see them misunderstood.
- H L Mecken

If you can't convince them, confuse them.
- Harry Truman

The key to being a good manager is to keep the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.
- Casey Stergal

Art can't hurt you.
- Fred Babb

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.
- Bob Marley

To be free, after all, one must break the law.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

The mad will not interrupt the madness of others. Solitude is precious, and the solitude of madness is like no other -- a commodity, not a condition. You earn it only by a ruthless pursuit of privacy.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"So I know why people kill themselves."
"Okay." Orley tried to be diffident. "Tell me why, then."
"They do it because there's nowhere else to hide."
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"we have to remember that some of us really do live for others. I don't mean unselfishly -- only that others are often at the centre of our own well-being. Dogs are like that".
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

That is the nature of tragedy. People die, but death is not the winner. At the end of every good tragedy, life is left standing.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

It hardly mattered that people had ceased to be the repository of safety. It was the illusion that had mattered. Safety is just an idea, he thought. There is nowhere truly safe. There never was.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

This is where, Marlow thought, the absolute exercise of absolute power puts you. Not beyond reality, but beyond the awareness of it.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

When I was born, the world wasn't like this.
Wasn't it?
No.
I suspect the world was always like this.
That's the problem.
Nothing changes?
No. It all gets worse.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"No one believes that its a dead-end street," said Fabiana. "The signs all say so -- but no one believes."
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

What did the Yellow Book Guide tell you? Not to touch without rubber gloves. They had said that, too, about AIDS -- and had been wrong. Don't touch. Don't move. Don't breathe. They might as well have said: be dead and be doe with it.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

"It is not wrong to love," he said. So long as you know what love is.
- Timothy Findley, "Headhunter"

If one imaginary thing exists, then all imaginary things must exist.
- Roger Zalazny and Robert Sheckley

To err with confidence is the prerogative of power.
- Roger Zalazny and Robert Sheckley

Brains are to you what feathers are to a frog.
- Sam MacLeod

Life is a journey, not a guided tour.
- Anonymous

You have to retain the ability to do things . . . even if what you do makes no difference.
- Roger Zalazny and Robert Sheckley

One of the most important things about having authority is being able to delegate responsibility.
- Roger Zalazny and Robert Sheckley

When their is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.
- Henry Robert

Let's just say I was testing the bounds of society. I was just curious.
- Jim Morrison

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
- James Klass

I am not intended to imply insult or judgement here but I am curious to know in order to respond to your posts in an appropriate manner, so please forgive what appears to be, bust is not in fact intended as, an insulting question: Are you stupid?
- Melinda Shore

Everything may happen.
- Seneca

To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy -- and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
- Robert Heinlin

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force -- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
- Joseph Conrad

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
- Hellen Keller

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that aren't so.
- Felix Okaye

Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against nature.
- General Petro Grigoreonko

American history is longer, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has every said about it.
- James Baldwin

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat eleventh grade.
- James W Loewen

You can kill a revolutionary but you can't kill the revolution.
- Fred Hampton

What passes for identity in America is a series of crimes about one's heroic ancestors.
- James Baldwin

By idolising those we honour, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. . . . We fail to recognise that we could go out and do likewise.
- Charlies Willie

. . . you can't get to justice without the truth to lead you there.
- Joan D Vinge

"I never thought before," said Tirrin, unruffled, "of the fact that there are people on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, "Look, there's our Moon." Our earth is their Moon, our Moon is their earth."
"Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned.
"In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirrin.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap -- "
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

You can go home again . . . so long as you understand that home is a place you have never been.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Uninfluenced by others, he never knew how he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"We can't prevent suffering. This pain, and that pain, yes, but not Pain."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"The rest of us keep pretending we're happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"The I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves"
"What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl said.
"No -- no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood is. It begins -- it begins with shared pain."
"Then where does it end?"
"I don't know. I don't know yet."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"To lock in, to lock out, the same act."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

There were walls around his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Comedy is tragedy plus time.
- Carol Burnett

A displacement suit like this was cutting-edge technology, which meant that its potential rate of failure was about as high as its cost.
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
- Gilbert Highet

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
- Kerry Thornley

They have exiled me from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except those whose noble spirits rebel against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth or duty.
- Kahil Gibran

There is only one blasphemy and that is the refusal to experience joy.
- Paul Rudnick

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
- E F Schumacher

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
- John Keynes

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
- The Communist Manifesto

Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgements.
- Rita Mae Brown

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
- Ursula Le Guin

Ever notice that what the hell is usually the right decision.
- Marilyn Monroe

If everybody's thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking.
- Anonymous

It usually takes a long time to find a shorter way.
- Anonymous

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of Chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Occasionally I have to think like myself to remember where I put something.
- Unknown

. . . looks like a dwarf who was dipped in pubic hair.
- Boy George

When they circumcised Herbert Samuel, they threw away the wrong bit.
- David George

She has a face like a well-kept grave.
- Anonymous

A testicle with legs.
- Pauline Kael

She has two things going for her, a father and a mother.
- John Simon

Please breathe the other way. You're bleaching my hair.
- Anonymous

Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.
- Richard Brenner

A triumph of the embalmer's art.
- Anonymous

To me, Edith looks like something that would eat its young.
- Dorothy Parker

He looks like a half-melted rubber bulldog.
- John Simon

His features resembled a fossilised washrag.
- Alan Brien

He is so fat his bathtub has stretch marks.
- Pat Williams

An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'd have someone to look up to.
- Gene Fowler

I won't say she's fat, but she had a face-lift and there was enough skin left over to make another person.
- Joan Rivers

Why do you heckle me? For all you know, I'm your father.
- Jack White

German is the most extravagantly ugly language -- it sounds like someone using a sick bag on a 747.
- Willy Rushton

Reviewing has some advantages over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.
- George Bernard Shaw

. . . looks like a condom full of walnuts.
- Clive Jones

She is so pure, Moses couldn't even part her legs.
- Joan Rivers

My father was a Creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey. My family, it seems, began where yours left off.
- Alexandre Dumas

Bambi with testosterone.
- Owen Glieberman

Her voice sounds like an eagle being goosed.
- Unknown

"Who ordered that?"
- I I Rabi, when told about the muon, a wholly unexpected new subatomic particle

A good astronomical theorist never lets the complete absence of information stand in the way of a nice theory and, conversely, never gets thrown when an actual observation arrives to spoil it.
- Sam Flamsteed

But days come when religion is not worth anything unless it is worth everything, days when only things which cannot be remain unshaken.
- John Oman, During World War I

"The way I heard it," I said slowly "true revolutionaries have to be willing to kill their own family."
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

(You love me . . . ) I though, discovering a kind of courage I hadn't known existed in me, until she gave me a reason to find it. The kind of courage it took to believe: (Anything is possible)
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

All I knew was that I had to find them. I had to know how unforgivable the truth was.
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

(Faith?) I thought. The only thing I believed in was the cosmic law that said if anything can go wrong, it would. (It's against my religion)
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

If there's anything I've learned, living with humans, it's never to underestimate the power of greed.
- Joan D Vinge, "Dreamfall"

No good deed every goes unpunished.
- Unknown

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
- Samuel Johnson

To suffering there is a limit, to fearing, none.
- Francis Bacon

Beware the man of one book.
- St Thomas Aquinas

Sleep! . . . Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death.
- Henry Longfellow

JOB: Just Over Broke.
- Zig Ziglar

Indeed, wretched the man whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.
- Accius

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen

To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
- W H Auden

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
- Elenor Roosevelt

Dreams do come true . . . You can have anything you want if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
- Sir James Barrie, author of Peter Pan

All our dreams can come true -- if we have the courage to pursue them.
- Walt Disney

Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
- P J O'Rourke

Hope is the expectation that someone or something is going to come along and save your butt.
- Anonymous

If its meant to be, its up to me.
- Burke Hedges

If everyone else is doing it, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
- Sam Walton

I'd rather have one percent of a hundred people's efforts than one hundred percent of my own.
- J Paul Getty

Before us lie two paths -- honesty and dishonesty, the short-sighted embark on the dishonest path; the wise on the honest. For the wise know the truth; in helping others we help ourselves; and in hurting others, we hurt ourselves. . . . Honesty is still the best policy.
- Wyn Davis

If you don't change your direction -- you're bound to end up where you're headed.
- Chinese Proverb

Fifty percent of my advertising is wasted -- I just don't know which half!
- John Wanamakar

The more powerful you are, the bigger your enemies are, too.
- Anonymous

Success is not defined by obtaining everything you want, but by appreciating everything you have.
- Anonymous

But if you build your life on dreams its prudent to recall; a man with moonlight in his hands has nothing there at all.
- Don Quixote

We all meet our masters, all of us -- why do you think we are in this world?
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Ah, there's the difficulty in depending on tricks -- they never work all the time, even the best of them. And when you have used them all, their is truly nothing left, nothing of yourself before the tricks, or beyond them.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

It is fortunate that I have few chances to learn with what terrible ease gentleness finds my heart.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Yes, I was drunk -- though not nearly drunk enough by my reckoning -- and yes, I was adrift between old, old aches and furies, as I had not been for some time. But I do not love out of pain, and I do not desire out of need or fear, no matter how far off my course I am.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Nobody runs like me, but nobody runs forever.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Adolf Hitler was denied entrance to the arts school in Venice. As a result, six million Jews died.
Beware of angry arts students.
- David Caldwell & Josh MacLeod

I survived. I do not know if that is the same thing as not dying.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

You know you've played "Doom" too long when you can type the cheat codes faster than you can type your name.
- Josh MacLeod

But who comes when no one calls?
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

"You destroyed my home," Arshadins empty voice said. "I have not forgotten."
"You have apparently forgotten that when I asked you to let me leave, flames leaped from the walls and great fanged pits opened in the floor. I regarded that as childish and ungracious, in addition to doing your woodwork no good. I said so at the time."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

What you have become, you always were.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

There should always be a moon, just a little piece, so you can find your way between things.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Perhaps we are all, even Wizards, no more than the faded sketches of the good we contain, the evil we might have done . . .
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Don't drink and park. Accidents cause people.
- Anonymous

Stars were seen on that night that have never been seen again, as everyone who was not their remembers.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

. . . the trouble with knowing everything is that you never learned anything.
- Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

God exists in the blasphemy, the devil in the piety.
- Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

It is certain became it is impossible.
- Terullian

Vengeance is the consolation of fools, Sheribi. That's why the Badakhar desire it so often.
- Crawford Killian

Why should so many evils be necessary?
- Crawford Killian

Our day begins when yours ends.
- Sherwood Park GIS, Homicide Department

History is the polemics of the victor.
- William Buckley Jr

The light, steady intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed into brilliance, regained the vision lost.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

His gentleness was uncompromising: because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He had not been free from anything, only free to do anything. Here it was the other way around.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

They think if people possess enough they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He would not have fought foe less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had loved, better than the truth.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

They'll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

There is a great deal thats admirable, I'm sure, about your society, but it doesn't teach you to discriminate -- which is after all the best thing civilisation teaches.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

As for violence, well, I don't know, Ollie: would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least effective means of obtaining order.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting father lost.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

What drives people crazy is trying to understand reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain -- you said that! But its the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get what I do need.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilisation does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

All you have to do to see life whole is to see it mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"There is a point, around age twenty," Bedap said, "when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue out of your own peculiarities."
"Or at least accept them with resignation," said Shevek.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He could go no farther, yet he must move.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"Justice is not achieved by force!"
"And power is not achieved by passivity!"
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

. . . he now understood why the army was organised as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organisation would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed women and children easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

To be is to be perceived.
- Berkley

"You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit their is hope!"
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Freedom is never very safe.
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"No man earns punishment, no man earns reward."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"No one who is not willing to go as far as I am willing to go has any right to stop me."
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

"But if each life is not new, each single life, when why are we born?"
- Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

He was a man who had accepted the unacceptable with uncommon strength and grace.
- Dean Koontz

No truth is written on paper.
- Eric Smith

The knowing is more important that the doing.
- Crawford Killian

The world has too many wonders in it for a single lifetime.
- Crawford Killian

We all deceive. Some of us deceive the whole world, every single fellow creature we meet. Some of us deceive only selected people, wives and lovers, mothers and fathers. And some of us deceive only ourselves. But none of us is totally honest with everyone all the time, in all matters. Hell, the need to deceive is just one more curse that our sorry species has to bear.
- Dean Koontz

The best advice I can offer is that you seek it form someone wiser than I.
- Crawford Killian

Respecting peoples freedom also meant respecting their stupidity.
- Crawford Killian

"Kindness. In this world of cruelty?"
"Yes, kindness because it is a world of cruelty.
- Crawford Killian

Activists are merely citizens with too much time on their hands.
- Donald Trump

They cheered him and what they saw as his courage, never knowing that Rhodry had the simple desire to get dying over with.
- Katharine Kerr

I'm as much myself as I need to be!
- Katherine Kerr

"We can only try," he said. "And with the help of friends, we may succeed."
- Gael Baudino

Everything affects everything, sooner or later.
- Diane Duane

A man never stands a s tall as when he kneels to help a child.
- Knights of Pythagoras

Love is not blind, it sees more not less;
But because it sees more it chooses to see less.
- Anonymous

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
- Chinese Proverb

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
- Mary Shafer

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death . . . thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
- Bertrand Russel

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?
- Rabbi Hillel

Power does not corrupt. fear corrupts . . . perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
- John Steinbeck

Hope is nature's veil for hiding truths nakedness.
- Alfred Noble

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
- Ghandi

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain

I've forgotten more incantations than that punk will ever know.
- Jonny Hart and Brant Parker

Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
- Hedy Lamarr

After all, I believed my job on earth was to procreate and be a pleasant sexual diversion to hard-working men.
- Margaret Trudeau Kemper

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
- Charles Bukowski.

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.
- Longfellow

There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no insurmountable barrier except our own inherent weakness of purpose.
- Elbert Hubbard

Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.
- John Wosley

I am always doing things I can't do. That's how I get them done.
- Picasso

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
- Confucius

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learned to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
- Carl Jung

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.
- Marian Anderson

The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows, its what a man or woman is able to do that counts.
- Booker Washington

My parents, like most parents, hoped I would be unexceptional.
- Scott O'Hara

I have about as much faith in the medical profession as I do in God.
- Scott O'Hara

. . . a closet, even the slightest of closets, is the most high-maintenance structure there is.
- Scott O'Hara

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.
- Eisenhower.

Oh, my friend, its not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left.
- Hubert Humphrey

Logic is like the sword -- those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
- Samuel Butler

Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
- Kurt Vonnegut

Too often we . . . enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
- John F Kennedy

Learn to obey before you command.
- Solon

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
- Tom Stoppard

To err is human, to blame the next guy even more so.
- Anonymous

Change is good, but dollars are better.
- Anonymous

. . . he's got to be himself until he dies, which is a worse punishment than anything you could do to him.
- Dean Koontz

Grief is good but guilt is pointless.
- Dean Koontz

"I no longer think you mad, though I begin to wonder about myself."
"The birth of wisdom."
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

"I retain a few scruples."
"Really?"
"Well, mostly to amuse myself, I'll admit."
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

"I'm always sure."
"That must be very nice for you."
. . . "I'm just not always right."
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

Never apologise, young man. If you have will enough to know what you did was wrong, you have will enough to do otherwise.
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

There's always hope where there are fools.
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

"You've power."
"So does a river. Still, humans master it, not it humans."
- Will Shetterly, "Why Cats Have No Lord"

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
- Bertrand Russel

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there's no river.
- Nikita Khruschev

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill

A single fact can spoil a good argument.
- Anonymous

The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut with a scythe.
- Russian Proverb

The really happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery even when on a detour.
- Anonymous

"Some think public humiliation is punishment enough for any crime." . . .
"And you agree?"
The captain nodded. "When the punishment is that of losing one's head."
- Will Shetterly , "Why Cats Have No Lord"

Tact is the art of making a pint without making an enemy.
- Anonymous

Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten the wrong half.
- Unknown

"I don't have any idea how wizardry works."
Iridith grinned. "Do you want to know one of the great secrets of the Wizards Guild? Most of us don't, either."
- Lawrence Watt-Evans, "The Misenchanted Sword"

Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused.
- Anonymous

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Alder

The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
- Anonymous

Democracy is the process by which the people are free to choose the man who will take the blame.
- Lawrence Peter

Honour isn't about making the right choices, it's about dealing with the consequences.
- Midori Cato

When you have a truly efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
- Harry Truman

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used in accomplishing the, These methods will be compared to the warfare of Ghengis Khan, who ruthlessly slaughtered every last inhabitant of Persia.
- Hans Betha

The fellow who's declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.
- Wilson Mizner

I am not in this world to live up to other peoples expectations, nor do I expect the world to live up to my own.
- Unknown

If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.
- Sears Consumers Guide, 1897

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
- James Feibleman

For the sceptic, there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman efficiency.
- Eric Ambler

Our way is not soft grass, it is a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upward, forward, towards the sun.
- Ruth Westheimer

Victory is a political fiction.
- Anonymous

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
- Albert Einstein

There is no way to rule innocent men.
- Ayn Rand

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
- Ayn Rand

A viler evil that to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in of his own free will, and that he build the furnace, besides.
- Ayn Rand

If takes two men to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man -- almost rarer -- who is great enough to see greatness and say so.
- Ayn Rand

He knows he hath a home, but scare knows where,
He sayes it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there.
- Vaughan

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings . . .
- Ayn Rand

. . . is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
- Ayn Rand

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? --
- John Milton

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.
- Ayn Rand

If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to man, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
- Woodsworth

Sorrow is knowledge, they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of life.
- Byron

What terrified me will terrify others. I need only describe the spectre which has haunted my midnight pillow.
- Mary Shelley, on Frankenstein

. . . for nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose -- a point on which the soul can fix its intellectual eye.
- Mary Shelley.

My life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth could place in my path.
- Mary Shelley

My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, my spirit is often depressed.
- Mary Shelley

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.
- Philip K Dick

The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, though it might be deemed sacrilege, is not banished.
- Mary Shelley

For one man may be evil, but ten million such as he are called good together.
- Ayn Rand

That which makes no sense makes the most sense.
- Philip K Dick

Faith shaken by the discovery that the entity believed in actually existed -- the paradox of piety.
- Philip K Dick

Sometimes rudeness was the better part of courage.
- Ian Watson

I embraced what I most feared, to screw up the courage to continue.
- Ian Watson

Once you identify something as a problem, it tends suddenly to get worse.
- Ian Watson

Opinion has it that cats can see things that are invisible to human eyes, Well, this isn't true. Half the time cats are simply looking in the wrong direction.
- Ian Watson

The real and the true could only be seized in a laugh, a laugh that would rattle the stars.
- Ian Watson

A person who can offer things is an oppressor, lady.
- Ian Watson

What was I, before I was?
- Ian Watson

If He was the maker of men, perhaps we can be the maker of gods.
- Jack Williamson

We are the total of our longings.
- Guy Gavriel Kay

You failed because humans fail. It is a gift as much as anything else.
- Guy Gavriel Kay

It makes them angry, but . . .courage is a figment of mens imaginations. Most bold men are merely unafraid, which is another thing entirely.
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

"Not many share my faith in the dawn of a new day, after the long, long night."
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

Inaction . .. is action enough.
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

"Courage is for people who think they've got something to lose."
The Kappelmeister said, "Perhaps you've got more than you realise, Gaetan du Cheyne."
More what? More courage, or merely more to lose?
Why don't I know?
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

Love makes us suffer.
- Philip Pullman

When death is inevitable, you don't need a reason to die, and therefore, no reason to live.
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

"The remarkable thing is not what a talking dog says, Gaetan, but that it speaks at all."
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

In a world where people ate only rocks, would there be anguished souls who suffered over the ignoble fate of stones?
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

How does it feel to be bargaining with the devil?
For that matter, how does it feel to be the devil with whom the downtrodden must bargain?
Now I know.
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

"I don't feel like a hero."
"Real heroes never do."
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

Do you call it a war, when its only five seconds long? Maybe you just call it the end.
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

. . . competence is everything, transcends fear, replaces courage. Why do you need courage, when you know you can win?
- William Barton, "Acts of Conscience"

He dares to do what most men and women don't even dare to think.
- Philip Pullman

A little tyranny can outweigh a lot of hope.
- Cheryl Franklin

They have a spell which, if you say it, lets you walk through a door that isn't there, and find yourself on another world. Some say it is not a spell but a key that can open even when there's no lock.
- Philip Pullman

"Seems to me --" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where it is needed."
- Philip Pullman

For a human being, nothing comes naturally.
- Philip Pullman

Perceptions are not truth.
- Cheryl J Franklin

Humanity as a whole is not a very rational species, even at its best.
- Cheryl Franklin

Nothing human is alien to me.
- Terence

"I can deny any of my senses," Akiro replied mildly, "except those of my mind."
- Robert Jordan

"You know, I don't regret knowing him. He made me who I am, and how can I regret being me?"
- Clive Barker, "Sacrament"

How many times would he have to waken, before he was as conscious as a man could be? A dozen? A hundred? Or did it go on forever, this rousing of the spirit, the skins of his slumbers stripped away, only to uncover another dream, and another?
- Clive Barker, "Sacrament"

"We're at the end, and nothing that went before seems of any consequence."
- Clive Barker, "Sacrament"

"Everything is consumed, Will, sooner or later. Living and dying we feed the fire."
- Clive Barker, "Sacrament"

" You shout against your own uncertainties. You fail to intimidate them."
- Cheryl J Franklin

Truth has no single owner.
- Cheryl J Franklin

"The simplicity of your question is deceptive."
- Cheryl J Franklin

Courage and cowardice become indistinguishable on the path of necessity.
- Cheryl J Franklin

"Do not fabricate, Marrach. Listening to you is not a pressing commitment on my part. Explain yourself succinctly, before you exhaust my limited curiosity."
"Nilson."
The ensuing pause was long enough to assure Marrach of Caragen's displeased surprise. "Brevity is a virtue, but excess is absurd."
- Cheryl J Franklin

Deception had been easy for Rabh Marrach who, valuing his own life no more than the lives of others, had valued nothing at all.
- Cheryl J Franklin

"Do not try to answer a question that offers only a false choice."
- Cheryl J Franklin

"If death be a "saving," the you be a hero."
- Cheryl J Franklin

Truth is the only constant.
- Cheryl J Franklin

How blind are the angry. How destructive are those who refuse to think beyond themselves.
- Cheryl J Franklin

Truth is the only constant among all people, all places, and all time. Only the perception of truth is variable.
- Cheryl J Franklin

"You understand that there is more to understand. . . . That is wisdom."
- Cheryl J Franklin

We attack those who mean us no harm, and we defeat ourselves.
- Cheryl J Franklin

Even mountains move in their own time.
- Cheryl J Franklin

To those who feel, the world is a tragedy. To those who think, the world is a comedy.
- Unknown

Battles are won en route.
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

"Leave it rest. I am here, and not unhappy, and I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark."
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

'What do you call it when one takes another's bread?"
"Hunger."
- David Gerold and Larry Niven, "The Flying Sorcerers"

"Once shall I tell you, and for yours ears only, and once is enough for those who are wise."
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

"Only thus are we not slaves: if we can choose where we would walk. Failing that, all is mockery."
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

"I have come this far and done this much. I will do no further on this path. There is a point beyond which the quest for the Light becomes a serving of the Dark."
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

"We are not slaves, even to our gifts."
- Guy Gavriel Kay, "The Fionavar Tapestry"

All bad poetry is sincere.
- Oscar Wilde

Change everything just a little so as to keep everything exactly the same.
- Lampedusa

He was a strong man, to be sure, and brave in the way that the strong can afford to be brave.
- C S Friedman, "Black Sun Rising"

We use what tools we must.
- C S Friedman, "Black Sun Rising"

"And I love you," she whispered back. "I always have." She shut her eyes tightly; a tear squeezed out of the corner of one of them. "I only wish that was enough to base a marriage on, Zen. But it isn't. Can't you see that?"
- C S Friedman, "Black Sun Rising"

"Sometimes, I think we are responsible for our defeat. When we play by the rules of the enemy, we inherit his weaknesses."
- C S Friedman, "Black Sun Rising"

"We're none of us as rational as we'd like to be."
- C S Friedman, "Black Sun Rising"

Eppur si mouve
But the earth still moves.
- Galileo, after his heresy conviction trial by the Inquisition.

I willingly accept the change, in whatever form it comes. I willingly accept the destruction of everything I have been, in order to create what I must become.
- C S Friedman

It was dangerous to pose questions, when you weren't sure you could handle the answers.
- C S Friedman

Love is a universal language, he reminded himself. . . .So is sorrow.
- C S Friedman

"So many of these things have no words, because we never have a need to describe them. The world is. The rahk are. That is enough for us."
"Humans struggle all their lives to achieve such acceptance," he mused. "And rarely succeed."
"I know. When I'm not filled with fury at their destructiveness -- or amazement at their stupidity -- I sometimes feel sorry for them."
- C S Friedman

"Are we back to morals again? Have we so soon forgotten the lesson our enemy taught us -- that if we hope to succeed, we must be willing to sacrifice everything?"
- C S Friedman

You can't break a sorcerer for information, an inner voice warned, Not with claws.
No, she answered. But you can have fun trying.
- C S Friedman

Kings may overrule grammar.
- Emperor Sigismund

"Well, you're wondrous foolish, but not altogether a fool."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Names are magic, names are all the magic there is . . .
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"I never wanted power as much as I did when I was fifteen."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"I guess I could have taught all that stuff I know somewhere, but I never wanted to. I didn't learn it to teach. I just wanted to be it, which is hard to explain to some people."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Me, I really don't want to know all this stuff, whether the universe runs on premium or unleaded.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"The more powerful a ruler is, the more likely it is that the seeds of his destruction are already taking root around him."
- C S Friedman

I take this hope as a prediction, if it is justice that determines man's contests.
- Simon Bolivar

We have already seen the light, and it is not our wish to be thrust back into darkness.
- Simon Bolivar

. . . seldom has desperation failed to achieve victory.
- Simon Bolivar

When mankind was in its infancy, steeped in uncertainy, ignorance, and error, was it possible to foresee what system it would adopt for preservation.
- Simon Bolivar

It is harder to release a nation from servitude than to enslave a free nation.
- Simon Bolivar

Is it conceivable that a newly emancipated people can soar to the heights of liberty, and, unlike Icarus, neither have its wings melt nor fall into an abyss? Such a marvel is inconceivable and without precedent. There is no reasonable probability to bolster our hopes.
- Simon Bolivar

Since it is impossible, I dare not desire it. . . .
- Simon Bolivar

Many things in this world were hard. That was what gave them power.
- C S Friedman

An intelligent man can justify anything in his own mind, if he's determined enough.
- C S Friedman

"Is there so little to fear in this world that you have to make enemies out of your neighbours?"
- C S Friedman

Calm, that most precious illusion, that kept his inner torment from being expressed and so kept it from being reflected back at him one, ten, a thousand times, in the mirror of others' souls. A stillness so absolute that nature had no equivalent . . . save at the heart of a storm.
- C S Friedman

"Does your god have nothing better to do than pass judgement on the innocent?"
- C S Friedman

Faith was a fantasy, a delusion. Faith was like wine; you poured it inside you and for a brief time it blossomed, it eased the pain of living, it banished the built that tended to clog up a mans head. And then it was gone, like wine; digested, expelled, forgotten. What was the point?
- C S Friedman

"I don't believe your words. I believe you. There's a difference."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

You can only watch someone go away so many times . . . To feel the loss, to know what was lost. To remember. That might be what I do best after all. I hope not.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Last night I saw the old moon
With the new moon in her arms.
- Unknown

"Human stupidity, human longing, human weakness. I have underestimated those forever."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"The gift you have was an apology, because you have nothing of your own."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

It is not so much the fact that everyone has a gun -- its that everyone want to be one.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"The point is that thing you keep missing, the point is power. Power doesn't need to explain itself, power is not about explaining. Power just does because it can."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"I don't even know what I don't understand."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

If I don't know her, how come she knows me? Who said it was right for her to know me?
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

". . . I don't have any particular trouble with the supernatural. It bewilders me about as much as the natural, I can't always tell them apart."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"A vain, silly child played a jump-rope trick on your friend, and now nothing but a miracle will help him. And that is exactly the bloody trouble with amateurs."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

For every action, an equal and opposite reaction -- that is true for gods and demons as well as rocket ships. If you bend the universe the wrong way -- which is what you would call a miracle -- and you lose your hold, the universe snaps back at you, you get something you did not ask for.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

"That was no miracle, that was only fear. It is the easiest thing in the world to make human beings afraid -- none of us could ever resist it. But no one can make the universe afraid."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

For some things there is no help, you just go home.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.
- Terry Brooks

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comforts, their beliefs. Thats were it is.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Nothing ever changes. For every understanding, a new terror -- for each foolishness at last pulled down, three new insanities sprouting. Such mess, such beauty, such helplessness.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Well, with power it is the same for everyone -- if you don't quite want it enough, it just leaves you, Power always knows, you see. And gods always lose their power, because we lose our pleasure in it, we all come to want other things, sooner or later. This is where we are different from human beings.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

You aren't immortal. You're just real, real old, there's a difference.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

There is nothing like you [humanity] anywhere among all the stars of the sky, do you realise that? You are the wonder of the cosmos, possibly for embarrassing reasons, but always a wonder.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

People have memories, groups have forgetteries.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Your power is a shadow, but a shadow of mercy
would have saved you,
Your knowledge is all shadow
but a shadow of understanding
would have saved you,
Your pride is the pride of a shadow, my sister,
But a shadow's shadow of respect for the gods
would have saved you,
would have saved you,
would have saved you,
from the shadows.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

But they fought to survive, and reason has no place in the mid of a creature fighting for its life.
- Terry Brooks

Necessity was a higher god than truth.
- Terry Brooks

The young fool tells his master he will suffer to gain the dweomer. Why is he a fool? Because the dweomer has made him pay and pay and pay again before he even stood on it's doorstep . . .
- Katharine Kerr

Men see life going from a dark to darkness. The gods see life as a death.
- Katharine Kerr

Technicalities are the soul of law.
- David Eddings

"But he is still me brother and I love him."
"That is what makes him so dangerous . . . he no longer loves you."
- Terry Brooks

. . . things of an age slowly dying; yet they were the hope of the hour to come. They were the key to life.
- Terry Brooks

Love supplies a kind of kind of strength that can withstand even death.
- Terry Brooks

But there were thousands of the enemy, and where hundreds failed, thousands ultimately succeeded.
- Terry Brooks

It was an unavoidable part of war, that men should die for unknown reasons . . .
- Terry Brooks

Winning isn't everything, its the only thing.
- Vince Lombardi

We first need to understand who we were before we can understand who we are.
- Terry Brooks

"Be careful," she said. "You're the only one I've ever had."
"The only one what?" There was no avoiding the question and they were both laughing when she replied, "Ah, if we only knew that. Wouldn't we be somewhere then?"
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"

Sometimes . . . the locks get turned before you even realise the doors have been closed.
- Terry Brooks

I am something no one should ever be. I am the last of my kind.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

It is easier to stay with the status quo, following a linear progression. Making a right-angle turn can be very painful.
- Albert Yu

They feel helpless to effect even the smallest change. Their madness is of their own making, yet they are powerless against it because they refuse to acknowledge its source. They are at war with themselves, but they do not understand the nature of the battle being fought.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

But for as much as he might appear otherwise, he was a knight, the best that the people were going to get and perhaps better than they deserved.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

"Do even a handful among your people believe that life in this country is better than it was twenty years ago?"
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

Everyone has secrets. That's part of life. None of us tells the other everything. We can't. Then there wouldn't be any part of us that did not belong to someone else.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

Secrets allow us space to change and grow as we must. Secrets give us privacy where privacy is necessary in order to survive.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

To see something you must cease to be it.
- Carolyn Gilman

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.
- Terry Brooks, "Running with the Demon"

To feel debased, you must have the feeling that you deserved better . . .
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

That's what self-knowledge is all about, exposure of those things you least want to know. We can never really know ourselves until we know shame.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

What people want, by and large, is what they are moulded into wanting.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

Now I know, as I didn't then, that emotion itself is a kind of talent not everyone has. A form of intelligence, perhaps -- though not much valued by any culture I know of.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

I became very interested in religion. The truth was, I desperately needed something to take me out of myself . . . I needed something to give me a nobler persona, whose eyes I could look through -- so I could face the world thinking, it's not just me inside here; its someone else, more worthwhile than me. Otherwise, I might have perished in self-awareness.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

"I'm not paranoid. Are you paranoid?"
"No, but someone paranoid may be listening to us."
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

"You are so much more alive than I, just from having lived less."
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

All humans are unique. Each of us has his or her own blend of abilities, deficits, and moral strengths. To say we are equal is degrading, as if we were no more than mass produced machines, interchangeable parts.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

Talent comes weighted with obligation -- a higher standard of behaviour and achievement.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

Anyone who understands irony is no mental defective.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

People who don't know you can't possibly give you enough credit for stupidity.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

You can't save everyone. Especially not from themselves.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

"It's so strange. I feel as if I don't have any notion of who I am, or even what I am. I half think I might meet myself on a street corner someday, and not even recognise me."
"Welcome to humanity," Val said.
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

"You can't imagine what it feels like to have no power, no power at all. I have no way to get anything but through humans. You are the ones who cause all things to happen. All of the rest of us -- plants, animals, whole planets -- we are just objects you humans batter around like some cosmic sport, using us in your competition to get ahead. We have no choice about where you're going to hit us, which direction our lives will ricochet -- unless somehow we learn a way into your hearts. Its not a game for us, its survival. It's how we must evolve. You're our natural selection."
- Carolyn Gilman, "Halfway Human"

All things change, but the past carries forward and becomes what is to be.
- Terry Brooks

If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.
- Terry Brooks

The difference now is that I am alone, not because others choose it for me, but because I choose it for myself. I am free to be exactly what I am -- and not feel strange about it.
- Terry Brooks

But I forget sometimes that there is a difference between disassociating and hiding. There is a limit to the distance we can place between ourselves and others. -- because the dictates of our world don't allow for absolutes.
- Terry Brooks

We cannot pretend that the world begins and ends at the boundaries we might make for it.
- Terry Brooks

. . . how can we lose by trying when by trying we have everything to gain?
- Terry Brooks

Loyalty is the only virtue I possess. Kindly stop throwing it back in my face.
- P C Hodgell

Ignorance goes a long way towards protecting honour.
- P C Hodgell

I'm no more apt to lie than you are, but there are a hundred ways to hide the truth.
- P C Hodgell

A king has no conscience lad, he gives it to his people.
- Tanya Huff

"We carry the pain," she said softly, "Because it is all that we can do."
- Tanya Huff

There are none so blind as those who will not see.
- Tanya Huff

Begin as you mean to go on.
- Anonymous

Violence is never the answer but, sometimes, like with cockroaches, it's the only possible solution.
- Tanya Huff

You know as well as I do that the victim goes on trial with the accused.
- Tanya Huff

Nothing came without a price and for his freedom, no price was to high.
- Tanya Huff

He realised that nothing he said in turn could convince the other man that another world existed outside -- or more frighteningly, inside -- the boundaries he'd lived with all his life.
- Tanya Huff

The best lie isn't a lie at all.
- Tanya Huff

Just because you don't see something does not mean its not there.
- Tanya Huff

It would be pretty stupid to kill himself, when the only thing he was sure of was that he existed.
- Christopher Stassheff

But often when I see myself
In moments quiet, deep,
Or in a mornings awakening
From dream-invaded sleep,
I know myself just as I am,
The child of long ago,
And all the fears of all the years
Are with me. This is so.
And I am too helpless and to weak
To conquer life and me;
Is being my frail, naked self
To be my destiny?
- Jane Browell, from "I am"

The cup half full, not half unfilled,
The eyes that look ahead
Distinguish those who choose to live
From those already dead.
- Jane Browell, from "Untitled"

I cannot breathe to save your breath,
And pain cannot be shared.
What have I ever given you
To show how much I cared?
Only a hope, a longing love,
A kiss and a sad prayer.
So much, no more I offer you
Tis all I can or dare.
- Jane Browell, from "The tragedy of Love"

The event that caused the most suffering, the most loss of life, the most loss of culture, was Columbus's discovery of America. It was the worst event in human history.
- Orson Scott Card

I think we are not meant to have
One treasure closely held;
Our hearts must open to the world,
By other loves impelled.
- Jane Browell, from "Untitled"

But to forgive is not forget,
Though wonds have lost their pain.
I must bear shields against more stabs
Or suffer them again.
Not innocent, but wiser now,
Yet free of angers chains,
I find life's pattern clear and bright
Since only love remains.
- Jane Browell, from "Unshackled"

The past can be our master
And make of us its slave,
With memories as shackles
And darkness of a cave.
But slaves have fled their masters
And shaped new destiny
By grasping fast the helping hands
That will them to be free.
The future, ever shorter,
Is here, seconds away,
And only those who have no bonds
Can grasp their dreams today.
- Jane Browell, "Untitled"

Run, don't walk, to the nearest library you can find and read what they're trying to keep from your eyes. Read what they're trying to keep from your brains. Because that's exactly what you need to know.
- Stephen King

Golf can be taught. it's just that it can't be learned.
- Leslie Neilson

. . . ethics become an art to justify the killing of folk who have no power to harm you.
- Daniel Keys Moran

Where was the error, wondered Loden, seven decades later, that we tried to kill him, or that we did not succeed?
- Daniel Keys Moran

Control does not come from strength, and strength does not come from anger; how, then, shall control come from anger?
- Daniel Keys Moran

I think the danger is not so much in asking the 'why' as in believing you have come up with the only answer.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Don't let fear overwhelm you. Don't become afraid of the fear.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

"His essence -- our soul, as you call it -- is trapped inside the dog. Inside the body of a dumb animal."
"47;Some might say we're all trapped that way."
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

But somewhere, sometime, someone must trust enough to reach out his hand to the enemy, though he knows the hand could but cut off at the wrist.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

If only. Our lives are made up of "if only's."
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

A prison is a prison only to a man who can't escape.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

The longer the stick, the easier to break.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Is it wrong to refuse to answer a question to which I don't know the answer?
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

It is death that gives life meaning. Death, the great equaliser. Man, woman, peasant, king, rich, poor: all of us fellow travellers to our journey's end. Life is sacred, precious, a thing to cherish, not to be taken lightly. You have lost all respect for death and thereby all respect for life.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Everything has a price, some just hide it better than others.
- Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

"We wander on a darkling plain, beset by ignorance and confusion."
"Thanks for summing up the whole condition of humankind."
- Christopher Stassheff

Any fool can handle a crisis. It's day to day living that wears you out.
- Anton Chekhov

One who dies in another's arms is no longer a stranger.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

Oftentimes, it is not personal preference that makes friends and enemies, but circumstance.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

Some dreams drifted too close to reality, and some realities too close to dream.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

I cannot condemn them for acting as I would under similar circumstances.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

"How about it, bruther cat? What do you think?"
Their feline companion shrugged, his ebony mane twitching as he did so. "Why put it to me? I am only a quadrupedal carnivore of comingled ancestry. Aren't humans the ones who are supposed to have big brains? That's what you're always saying, anyway. Or are you experiencing second thoughts about your own cerebral propaganda?"
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

A question without an answer is not a question.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

You cannot forget something that was not there to know.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
- Charlotte Whitton

There are certain diseases I fear, Etjole. Among them are the chills and fevers a mosquito brings, the swelling of limbs one gets from an infestation of certain worms, the closure of the bowels, the clap, the spotted death, leprosy, and altruism. I count the last among the most deadly.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

I only want to discharge my obligation and return as quickly as possible to my family and to my village. That is what is important to me. That is what I have built my life around. Not abstract notions of what may be considered acceptable behaviour among those I do not care for and do not know.
- Alan Dean Foster, "Carnivores of Light and Darkness"

She learned what everyone learns in war. Living through it is all that matters.
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

We are what we fear in others.
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try.
- Mother Teresa

Always and forever. Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

The trouble with illusions, he thought, is that you aren't aware you have them until they are taken away from you.
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

Sarcasm is not an argument . . .
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

"You've seem what " Emilio conceded, "But not why! That's where God is, Anne. In the why of it -- in the meaning.
- Mary Doria Russel, "The Sparrow"

"They're idealists, unfortunately."
. . . "So? My lord, there are worse crimes"
"No, there are not."
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Ring"

Standing for truth is one thing, but saying it when you haven't been asked is another.
- Christopher Stassheff

If you have not made a mistake in your life, you have not done a damn thing.
- Frank Burns

And the friendless one reflected
"Wherefore have I been created?
Who has made me and has doomed me
Thus without a sun to wander
Through the starry wastes forever?"
- The Kalevala

Just because it came from a poet, doesn't make it any less true.
- Tanya Huff

A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.
- Voltaire

If you can't share the reality, there are worse things than having someone to share the masks.
- Tanya Huff

Convincing yourself does not win an argument.
- Robert Half

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
- Mark Twain

Doing nothing is the hardest task of all.
- Anonymous

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
- Leon J. Suenens

One half of the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
- H G Wells

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
- William Gaddis.

Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.
- Benjamin de Casseres

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have of changing others.
- Jacob Braude

I have two convictions. First, more harm has been done by weak persons than by wicked persons, secondly, the problems of this world are caused by the weakness of goodness rather than by the strength of evil. It is evident that we have allowed technology to outstrip social controls . . . Man must catch up with what he has created.
- Harry S Kennedy

The path of least resistance is what makes rivers crooked.
- Elbert Hubbard

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
- Victor Hugo

They that deny God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
- Francis Bacon

If there was no God, there would be no atheists.
- G K Chesteron

. . . there is always a bright side. Or a side less dark.
- Tanya Huff

Power always attracts those who will abuse it.
- Tanya Huff

. . . what does a man die of but his death.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

"You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?"
"No -- "
"To exhibit the perfect weakness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

. . . Truth is a matter of imagination.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainy: not knowing what comes next.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

The admirable is inexplicable.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

. . . the shortcomings are in the messenger, not the message.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

The unexpected is what makes life possible.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

To oppose something is to maintain it.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

To learn what questions are unanswerable and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time . . .
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and the cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

What is more arrogant than honesty?
- Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

My stone doesn't belong to me
It belongs to the government
or God.
But I know that nobody
Cared for it before
Me, the one who found it.
- Bettina Pfoestech

"There is this about the truth, Loga. I misdoubt it is any more powerful, in and of itself, than a lie; lies are believed so easily by so many. But because it is the truth, it can be rediscovered when the lie is long forgotten."
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Ring"

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
- C S Lewis

The magic was gone, both the white and black.
- Stephen King

What would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?
- Clive Barker

Saints and martyrs rule from the tomb.
- T S Elliot

The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.
- Lucretius

Being deeply loved by someone
gives you strength,
while loving someone deeply
gives you courage.
- Lao Tzu

I am not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
- Woody Allen

The long habit of living indisposeth us for death.
- Sir Thomas Browne

They envy you for being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't merely happy to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.
- Dean Koontz

Understanding wasn't always necessary, as long as you believed.
- Dean Koontz

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
- Dean Koontz

Fighting doesn't preclude enduring. I can fight, and if fighting fails, I can still endure.
- Dean Koontz

No living organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
- Shirly Jackson

Action is the last resort of those who do not know how to dream.
- Oscar Wilde

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.
- Voltaire

I do not think much of the man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
- Abraham Lincoln

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
- Walter Lippman

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and seek peace like intellectual pygmies.
- Basil O'Connor

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
- Michael de Montaigne

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
- Oscar Wilde

He had so much money that he could afford to look poor.
- Edgar Wallace

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
- Mae West

War hath no fury like a non combatant.
- Charles Edward Montague

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
- Jeanette Rankin

It is the blood of the soldier that makes the general great.
- Italian Proverb

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
- Thomas Mann

Always remember that a soldier's pack is lighter than a slave's chains.
- David O McKay

How is the world ruled and how do wars start?
Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
- Karl Kraus

War would end if the dead could return.
- Baldwin

I wonder what the world would be like if men always had sacrificed as freely to prevent wars as to win them.
- Frank A Clark

Be not disturbed at being misunderstood, be disturbed rather at not being understanding.
- Chinese Proverb

Why does civilisation keep on receding? Each war, even if won, is a fresh defeat on intelligence.
- Sarah Bernbardt

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.
- Samuel Jackson

"The chained," she said, "are luckier than the unchained. If you are chained, it means you have a place to sleep."
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
- Tennessee Williams

A cliché is a truth one doesn't believe.
- Bernard Taper

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
- Josh Billings

History has it's truth. So has legend hers.
- Victor Hugo

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.
- Syndey Smith

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
- Dagobert D Runes

It is as hard to tell the truth as to hide from it.
- Battasar Gracian

Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.
- John Collins

It is not moral to lie, but you don't always have to tell the truth.
- Ignes Bernstein

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
- William Blake

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
- George Elliot

Politics is a jungle -- torn between doing the right thing and staying in office.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Who is speaking of victory? To survive is everything.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

No man will work for your interests unless they are his.
- David Seabury

Only the vanquished remember history.
- Marshal McLuhan

Much bending breaks the law, much unbending the mind.
- Francis Bacon

The town cares for the devils work no more than it cares for God's or mans. it knew darkness. And darkness was enough.
- Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot"

Enemies he could live with, liars he couldn't.
- Clive Barker

In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil -- or perhaps (evil). At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing more than a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humour -- the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in break to seagulls unutterably funny.
- Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot"

You humans are very odd. You don't even recognise your own dreams when you see them coming true.
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

. . . every desire of the human heart is just the real desire in disguise, the desire of the world.
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

Nothing is assured, nothing. The gate was open and it was not God who was waiting, only emptiness.
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

Nothing is ever complete, she thought -- not even destruction.
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

"They give us our desire and desire is not a little thing. It is one of the powers that hold the universe together -- set free it must tear things apart, one way or another. . . . Even, even the desire for hope, to turn people form despair, will end in destruction -- "
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

I am betting all I have in the world. That makes it a big money bet for any man.
- Joel Richards

'Thy tears are for those beyond tears, and are your words words of wisdom? The wise grieve not for those who live, and they grieve not for those who die. Life and death will pass away. . . ."
- Gwyneth Jones, "Divine Endurance"

What would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?
- Clive Barker

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
- Terry Pratchett, "Maskerade"

'A secret panel that ain't there is the best kind there is, the reason bein', no bugger can find it.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Maskerade"

It's one thing to know the truth, he thought. To live with it is something else altogether.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

'Money's only useful for the things it can do.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Maskerade"

Finally Carol clapped her hands and said we were all going outside to play follow the leader, the game that asks the burning question: Are you ready for tomorrow's society?
- Richard Bachman, "Rage"

The Bible says the snake tempted Eve with the apple. What would have happened if he had been forced to eat it himself?
- Richard Bachman, "Rage"

"You're dying and you don't know why."
"It's not important after your dead."
- Richard Bachman, "The Long Walk"

We must never seek to establish a rule so rigid as to leave no room for exception.
- St. Ignatius

The middle way is always the most difficult path to follow.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

. . . it's only law because you agree to it.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

I think perhaps it is not change but resistance to change that takes time.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Indeed . . . that which is not forbidden must be permissible for to find the opposite true implies that those who established the law were lacking in foresight.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Comparison is the source of all significance.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

The only prison is our own limitations.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

At times, the best solution to a maze is to reduce it to embers and walk straight through the ashes.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Powerlessness debases. Power can be used to good effect or ill, but no one is improved by weakness.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

"It was our belief that any institution considering itself the guardian of truth will value constancy, for change by definition introduces errors."
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

The chief source of all evils to man, as well as baseness and cowardice, is not death but fear of death.
- Epictetus

The noblest kind of retribution is not to becomes like your enemy.
- Marcus Aurelius

The safest course is to tempt fortune rarely.
- Seneca

The God of Israel cannot be seen but he sees us -- when we are ready, when we are not ready, when we are at our best or at our worst or paying no attention. Nothing can be hidden from such a God. that is why people fear Him.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

In his soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or error or even sin that broke God's heart; it was indifference.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.
- Unknown

In the absence of certainy, faith is more than mere opinion, faith is hope.
- Mary Doria Russel, "Children of God"

In all the shrouded heavens anywhere
Not a whisper in the air
Of any living being but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music.
- Edward Arlington Robinson

A man has to take responsibility for his own life at some point.
- Charles de Lint, "Someplace to be Flying"

That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
- Barry Lopez

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
- Henry Ward Beecher

History repeats itself, but at an accelerated pace.
- Dwight Yokam

She'd nurtured her hopes here and wasted time she could have used realising them.
- Clive Barker, "Everville"

It may be that, in spite of all our conceits, customs other than our own may be generally accepted or condoned in other societies, and may even be more moral.
- Judge John H Sissons

What I do know is that we've all got our hidden currents, no matter how wide and friendly the river is.
- Charles de Lint, "Someplace to be Flying"

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good and any action taken for one's benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion for moral value -- so long as the beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
- Ayn Rand, "The Virtue of Selfishness"

What we want most is a secret no one can tell us.
- Anonymous

"There is no such thing as fiction," Anne told her once. "If you can imagine something, then it happened."
- Charles de Lint, "Someplace to be Flying"

Kerry didn't think she'd ever been brave. She could endure, but that wasn't the same thing at all.
- Charles de Lint, "Someplace to be Flying"

If guns were outlawed, only outlaws would have guns.
- Bumper Sticker

Ultimately you have to understand that there is order in the universe, even if there is no order in your immediate circumstances.
- Jane Seiberry

To me the Universe was all void of Life, or Purpose, or Volition, even of Hostility, it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. A vast, gloomy, solitary Golgatha, and Mill of Death. Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious. Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?
- Thomas Carlyle

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused armies of struggle and flight
While ignorant armies clash by night.
- Mathew Arnold. "Dover Beach"

We summon you back, summon you back
From dark and silent earth,
We summon you back, summon you back
To sail the sea and sky
Our love will abide, our love will abide,
When sun and stars are gone . . .
- Crawford Killian, "Red Magic"

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
- Thoreau

All concur that free society is a failure. We slave holder's say you must recur to slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism.
- George Fitzhugh

The happiness of the ignorant is no less so than any other.
- Alan Dean Foster

Preconceived notion serve no purpose.
- Mickey Reichert, "The Legend of Nightfall"

Every man and woman has a price. If he could meet it with money, he saw no need to meet it with anything else.
- Mickey Reichert, "The Legend of Nightfall"

When you willingly choose another's troubles as your own, you stop surviving and start living.
- Mickey Reichert, "The Legend of Nightfall"

Reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history.
- Ayn Rand

People can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.
- William James

When you hire people smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are.
- John Charles Salak

Failures are divided into two classes -- those who thought and never did and those who did and never thought.
- John Charles Salak

It is only in these troubles hours things are seen more clearly. The lamps of cities blur many things that are plain beneath the moon.
- Tad Williams, "To Green Angel Tower"

The greatest mistake a man can make is being afraid to make one.
- Elbert Hubbard

I love it when we make excuses for the way things are.
- Eric James Fullilove, "Circle of One"

. . . no one understands the abuse of power quite as well as those who share the potential.
- Tanya Huff, "Blood Pact"

I suppose no day is so bad that you can't make it worse.
- Tanya Huff, "Blood Pact"

Appreciation made the best motivator, regardless of where it was applied.
- Tanya Huff, "Blood Pact"

Adults lose their ability to offer unconditional loyalty. It is a thing of youth, and it rarely survives youth.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

Make love now, by night and by day, in winter and in summer. . . . You are in this world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy, love. To make love is all the law, and all the prophets.
- Anatole France

All power arises from transformation, the movement from one state of existence to another.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

You know, its strange. People who can tell you in a minute what they would kill for can't tell you what they would die for; and the people who know what they would die for can't tell you what they are living for. And its weird because they're all the same thing. When you know what you'll kill for then unless you're a sociopath you have to know what you'll die for; a life equals a life. And we're all going to die someday, so whatever you send your life doing, that is what you died for.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

That running away could not be simply a strategically reasonable response to overwhelming military superiority, but in fact the most successful of all forms of resistance, was a concept many humans of his time had difficulty understanding -- at least until it was demonstrated.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

"This is my favourite part," Trent said. "Please accept my apologies now in case we die doing this."
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

That is the nature of fighting. Winning a fight is only a bare step above losing one.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

And it came to me, when I dreamed, that I must for the sake of survival, become again the creature for whom survival is not everything.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

The more complex the argument gets . . . the easier it is to refute.
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Last Dancer"

More atrocities are committed in the name of religion than for any other reason.
- Unknown

It is the nature of power that those who wield it must suffer from it, even as their victims suffer.
- Joan D Vinge, "The Storm King"

Evil deeds are done by those who mean only well.
- Sean Russell, "World Without End"

If you value stability that much, then I'd say its time somebody did disturb it.
- Joan D Vinge, "The Peddler's Apprentice"

Always men have seemed unable in the midst of their creation to resist the urge to destroy, and always they have found the means to destroy utterly.
- Joan D Vinge, "The Peddler's Apprentice"

It is a lesson that awaits us all. So many years of schooling provide so little education.
- Sean Russell, "World Without End"

"Those who cease to be amazed, Tristam, have placed one foot firmly in the grave.
- Sean Russell, "World Without End"

There's no point believing in things that exist.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. Its only the losers who have glorious victories.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

To wait for life is the pathway to death.
- Sean Russell, "Sea Without A Shore"

This Is Religion, Boy. Not Comparison Bloody Shopping. You Shall Not Subject Your God To Market Forces!
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

Getting an education was a bit like getting a communicable disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had to pass it on.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

'He's had a near-death experience!'
'We all have. It's called "living."'
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

The problem with scandalous allegations is that they tend to be true.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Chaos Come Again"

HUMANS NEED FANTASIES TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little --'
YES. AS PRACTISE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
'So we can believe the big ones?'
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. COMPASSION. THAT SORT OF THING.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

What expression shall we see in our own eyes, if we see evil and do nothing, or do evil and see ourselves?
- Wilhemina Baird, "Chaos Come Again"

We must know the dreams of stars, to understand the nature of things.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Chaos Come Again"

If we must, we may have to do right by doing wrong.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Chaos Come Again"

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
- Elenor Rossevelt

Effort only fully receives its reward after a person refuses to quit.
- Napoleon Hill

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
- Thomas Jefferson

. . . never dying means you don't really have to grow up.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

"There's more to life than living forever."
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

Americans never change. We wait until there is nothing left to do but . . . act.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

We are all animals. You may reject that animal self as a personal choice, but doing so doesn't make you more of a person, or less of an animal.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

Atheists think that if they don't believe, then the reality will . . . go away. And yet they understand that our faith has nothing at all to do with the existence of God. You'd think intelligent people would be able to make that kind of logical inference, wouldn't you.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

The truth? When all things are possible, nothing is real. We all existed, and none of us.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

. . . It's only the stories we tell that make sex a lovely moment lost in eternity. It's only the stories that make it . . . love.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

Silly. Can God damn himself?
Why would he bother?
Just to show He can?
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

One word, bitter, hard, a word without end: Unfair. But when you act, you incur responsibility.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

Edgar, the Rebellious Angel, walking in the footsteps of old Lucifer, thinking he brought light and life to the world but . . . there was a reason for Prometheus's punishment. It wasn't because the gods were jealous of his gift. It was because he brought down evil on the innocent.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

I've always despised the way the Old Man punished Adam and Eve for succumbing to the temptation he laid in their way. Entrapment is an ugly thing.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

The hearts of doctors eventually sicken the grow cold.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

The devil gives you what you want. Only the Lord takes away.
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

"Then what the Hell is the point?"
Why does there have to be a point to your life?
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

"What we imagine of other people is seldom more than a reflection of what's in our own hearts."
- William Barton, "The Transmigration of Souls"

'You are a man, Elric of Melnibone. That is why I saved you. There are few men in any world.'
- Michael Moorcock, "Elric of Melnibone'

Discipline: Willing to do the things today others won't do to have the things tomorrow others won't have.
- Anonymous

You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.
- Anonymous

Success: The progressive realisation of a worthy ideal.
- Anonymous

Memory says "I did that." Pride replies, "I could not have done that." Eventually, memory yields.
- Nietzsche

Not everyone can be equal in wealth, but no one should have to starve.
- Tanya Huff, "Sing the Four Quarters"

"You're forgetting that in an emotional response, rational thought has no place. If you can manage to invoke two or more conflicting emotional responses, rational thought has no chance."
- Tanya Huff, "Sing the Four Quarters"

Four younger brothers had taught her that, moral position aside, children might as well be told the truth because no adult could predict how they'd react to it.
- Tanya Huff, "Sing the Four Quarters"

"You can't be more if the cost is an innocent life."
- Tanya Huff, "Sing the Four Quarters"

Sometimes, the best way to avoid detection was to call attention to oneself.
- Irene Radford, "The Glass Dragon"

"What kind of god makes love a sin? . . . Too little of it in this world as it is."
- Tanya Huff, "The Fire's Stone"

"Perhaps he would not have. But a powerful man with no power is dangerous."
- Tanya Huff, "The Fire's Stone"

But there was a price. No one asked you to pay it, but the very absence of demand was a moral obligation.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

People've got enough to cope with just being people.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

Gods might note the fall of a sparrow, but they didn't make any effort to catch them.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

The price for being the best is always . . . having to be the best.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

Animals can't murder. Only superior races can murder. That's one of the things that sets us apart from animals.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

. . . the will that was desire, the will so strong it could not be resisted by all the powers of normality . . .
- Diane Duanne, "Deep Wizardry"

"There is no joy that has not tasted first of grief."
- Mercedes Lackey, "Arrow's Flight"

No one honours a saint on his hearthstone.
- Mercedes Lackey, "Arrow's Flight"

The final proof of the omnipotence of God: He doesn't have to exist in order to save us.
- Peter DeVries

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson

To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human absurdity, would be the ultimate irony.
- R. Leaky, "Origins"

Can't we all just get along?
- Rodney King

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping the common people quiet.
- Napoleon

All religions have been made by man.
- Napoleon

You don't want abortions, you want battered children
You want to ban the pill as if that solves the problem
Now you wanna force us to pray in school
God must be dead if you're such a fool.
- Dead Kennedys "Moral Majority"

Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?
- John Adams

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another.
- Jonathan Swift

The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
- John Adams

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
- Stephen Roberts

No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.
- Montiesque

When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
- Oscar Wilde

[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by "god" to scourge "adulterers," whooping cough and measles weren't purposely created to lambaste children.
- Fred Woodworth

I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.
- Susan B. Anthony

History is rarely made by reasonable men.
- Terry Goodkind, "Blood of the Fold"

Incompetence more often saps genius than other lesser lights.
- R B Sparkman, "The Art of Manipulation"

"What makes you think you have the right to tell the Gods how things ought to be done?"
"What makes them think They had the right?"
- Diane Duane, "The Book of Night with Moon"

Society owes more to those who break the laws than to those who keep them.
- Salvador Dali.

"I can say something to you, Denice, but all I've done is move the air. I've caused no sensation in you; you cause whatever effect is achieved, based on how you interpret what I've said."
- Daniel Keys Moran, "The Long Run"

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjecture.
- Anatole France

Victims of curcumstance owe it to fate. Victims of choice owe it to themselves.
- Deborah Christian, "Mainline"

You are gaining in wisdom. Pain is the price of wisdom.
- Ben Bova, "Orion Among The Stars"

No miracle has ever taken place except under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of people who are disposed to believe in them.
- Ernest Renan

'There are two kinds of intelligent creatures in the galaxy: those who can fight, and those who are extinct."
- Ben Bova, "Orion Among The Stars"

"It is not rational to expect a man to stand and fight when he is being shot at. A sane man would turn and run for safety. Training takes care of that."
- Ben Bova, "Orion Among The Stars"

"I wonder what it's like to be a plasma cloud." . . .
"Peaceful," said Frede
"Mind-expanding."
"Just plain expanding."
- Ben Bova, "Orion Among The Stars"

. . . like letting a five year old loose in a pet shop with a chain saw.
- James Bibby, "Ronan the Barbarian"

Meaningless people have to be sophisticated, because they have nothing else.
- David Eddings, "The Losers"

What greater power can you have than to be able to make someone not only do what you want them to but think what you want them to as well?
- David Eddings, "The Losers"

You can cure somebody of anything if you put him in a cult and grind off all individuality and alienate him from such distractions as family, friends, wives -- that sort of thing.
- David Eddings, "The Losers"

"It is not power and wealth that corrupt, my lady, but the lust for power and wealth."
- Mercedes Lackey, "Wings of Fire"

It is easy for parents to pull the strings that make one dance. . . . After all, they are the ones who tied those strings in place.
- Mercedes Lackey, "Spring Plowing at Forst Reach"

Thus Athenian democracy was often guided by bursts of emotion rather than carefully-reckoned reality, a danger that lurks in the shadow of every democracy -- including our own.
- Ben Bova

As flies to wanton boys, we are to gods;
They kill us for their sport.
- Shakespeare, "King Lear"

Every time I smoke a cigarette, I keep a whole chain of people round the world in business.
- Ghandi

But only by noncontention
is there nothing extreme.
- Tao Te Ching

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
- Stephen Vizinczey

The most important service rendered by the press is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
- Samuel Butler

Yahweh, therefore, had become the one and only God. There was no attempt to justify his claim philosophically. As always, the new theology succeeded not because it could be demonstrated rationally, but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope. Dislocated and displaced as they were, the Jews no longer found the cult of Yahweh alien and disturbing. It spoke profoundly to their condition.
- Karen Armstong, "A History of God"

Thirty spokes join at the hob:
their use for the cart
is where they are not.
- Tao Te Ching

Therefore when faith is insufficient
and there is disbelief
It is from the high value placed on belief.
- Tao Te Ching

Skilled warriors of old were subtle,
mysterious powerful,
so deep they were unknowable.
Just because they were unknowable
I will try to describe them.
- Tao Te Ching

When intelligence comes forth
there is great fabrication.
- Tao Te Ching

Eliminate craft, abandon profit,
and theft will no longer exist.
- Tao Te Ching

How far apart are yes and yeah?
How far apart are good and bad?
- Tao Te Ching

If you are feared by others you cannot but therefore fear others.
- Tao Te Ching

Most people celebrate
as if they were barbecuing a slaughtered cow
- Tao Te Ching

To speak rarely is natural
- Tao Te Ching

Is it empty talk, the only saying
that tact keeps you whole?
When truthfulness is complete,
it still resorts to this.
- Tao Te Ching

People who are not good
are students of people who are not good.
- Tao Te Ching

Brambles grow where an army has been;
there are always bad years after a war.
- Tao Te Ching

. . . when you are in an ascendancy of power
you handle it as you would a mourning.
When you have killed many people
you weep for them in sorrow.
When you win a war,
you celebrate by mourning.
- Tao Te Ching

Therefore virtue comes after loss of the Way;
humanity comes after loss of virtue,
duty comes after loss of humanity,
courtesy comes after loss of duty.
- Tao Te Ching

Those who know others are wise;
those who know themselves are enlightened.
Those who overcome others are powerful;
those who overcome themselves are strong.
Those who are contented are rich;
those who act strongly have will.
Those who do not lose their place endure;
those who die without perishing live long.
- Tao Te Ching

Should you want to weaken something,
you must deliberately let it grow strong.
- Tao Te Ching

Foresight is the flower of the Way,
and the beginning of ignorance too.
- Tao Te Ching

Therefore nobility is rooted in humility,
loftiness is based on lowliness.
This is why high people refer to themselves
as alone, lacking, unworthy.
Is this not being rooted in humility?
So there is no praise in repeated praise;
they don't want to be like jewels or stones.
- Tao Te Ching

The things people dislike
are only to be alone, lacking, and unworthy;
yet these are what monarchs call themselves.
Therefore people may gain from loss,
and may lose from gain.
What others teach,
I also teach.
The strong cannot master their death:
I take this to be the father of teachings.
- Tao Te Ching

I know that knowledge is pain, but so is ignorance once one has sensed its presence.
- Brian W Aldiss, "The Worm That Flies"

All children are immortal, until they grow up.
- Brian W Aldiss, "The Worm That Flies"

The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless, but ultimately, I can only act on my desperate will to survive.
- Greg Egan, "Learning To Be Me"

Things do happen, regardless of people's best-laid plans, most heartfelt wishes, and most intense desires.
- Brian Sstableford, "Mortimer Gray's History of Death"

It was not tools which created man and gave birth to civilisation, Mortimer Gray proclaimed, but the awareness of mortality.
- Brian Sstableford, "Mortimer Gray's History of Death"

What movement is more disturbing than stillness?
- Brian Sstableford, "Mortimer Gray's History of Death"

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gamain, "Good Omens"

You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocritisism and geography and history and economics -- why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate materials, or spend fifty years learning to beat your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plow.
- T H White

Most books on witchcraft will tell you witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men,
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gamain, "Good Omens"

IF PEOPLE KNEW THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN'T LIVE AT ALL.
- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"

Designers don't sell clothes, they sell doses of self-confidence.
- Jacob Niefzwicki

'One does not need power, surely, to be happy?'
- Michael Moorcock, "The Hollow Lands"

Overheard or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, although usually no one is.
- Lorrie Moore, "Birds of America"

There was nothing as complex in the world -- no flower or stone -- as a single hello from a human being.
- Lorrie Moore, "Birds of America"

We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting cool and white.
- Ian McEwan, "Amsterdam"

For once I looked on worlds sublime,
        And knew pure beauty, free of time,
Knew unchained joy, untempered hope;
        And coward, then, I fled!
- Ernest Wheldrake

Detected now beneath the organ's note,
        The organ's groan, the bellows whine;
And what the Sun made splendid,
        Bereft of Sun is merely fine!
- Ernest Wheldrake

'My instincts and my reason are both at one.' . . . 'Both tell me that a race that struggles is a race that survives.'
- Michael Moorcock, "The End of all Songs"

'Madness may only be the expression of ordinary emotional confusion. Fear of madness can cause, I believe, a retreat into the very madness one fears. This is only superficially a paradox. Madness may be said to be a tendency to simplify, into easily grasped metaphors, the nature of the world.'
- Michael Moorcock, "The End of all Songs"

'To be sinful, one must have a sense of sin.'
- Michael Moorcock, "The End of all Songs"

So shall they dance till the end of time,
Each face a mask, each mark a sign
Of pride disguised as pain.
Yet pity him who must remain,
His flesh unflayed, his soul untried:
His pain disguised as pride.
- Ernest Wheldrake

But the world has wondrously changed, Granny,
        since the days when you were young.
It thinks quite different thoughts from then
        and speaks with a different tongue.
The fences are broken, the cords are snapped,
        that tethered man's heart to home;
He ranges as free as the wind or the waves, and changes
        his shore like foam.
- Alfred Austin

Let us go hence --the night is now at hand;
        The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
        And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown,
Despair and death, deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
        Laughter or tears, for we have only known
        Surpassing vanity; vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
- Ernest Dawson, "Last Word"

In ancient shadows and twilights
        Where childhood hath stray'd,
The world's greatest sorrows were born
        And it's heroes were made.
- G W Russell

Kindle me to constant fire,
Lest the nail be but a nail!
Grant me wings of great desire,
Lest I look within and fail!
- George Merideth, "The Song of Theodolinda"

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilisations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the calibre of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
- Thomas Jefferson

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
-Thomas Jefferson

People seldom improve when they have no one but themselves to copy after.
- Gold Smith

I no longer need people with the nervous anxiety that hurries us towards every lighted candle when we are young. I believe that one should learn the difference between being lonely and being alone.
- Hector Bolitho, in "This I Believe"

There is too much adulation for the man whom swims the channel and not enough for the man who sits on the beach and contemplates the waters before him.
- Hector Bolitho, in "This I Believe"

I am not too dismayed by the darkness into which mankind has betrayed itself, for I know as only women can know that all new life comes out of darkness through the gateway of agony and anguish to the Light.
- Frances P. Bolton, in "This I Believe"

If there was one thing in the world I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you can ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern.
- Peter S Beagle, "The Innkeeper's Song"

Stupid men are often capable of doing things the clever would not dare to contemplate.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

. . . the more policemen you had, the more crimes seemed to be committed.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

It might just be possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you would probably be charged with loitering.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

And maybe a watchman had seen civilisation with the skin ripped off one time too many, stopped acting like a watchman and starting acting like a human being and realised that the click of a crossbow or the sweep of a sword would make the world so clean.

- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay

"You can't fight ignorance with ignorance.
- Andrew Barclay

'Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms Of Denial. Therefore, Athiesm Is A Form Of Belief. If The Athiest Truly Did Not Believe, He Or She Would Not Bother To Deny.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

. . . 'And power goes to people's heads.'
'And then other people's heads fall off.'

- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything else struck at the whole basis of policing.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

'You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves?'
'Seems to be a major human activity, yes.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

'Commander, I always used to consider that you had a definite anti-authoritarian streak in you."
'Sir?'
'It seems you have managed to retain this even though you are authority.'
'Sir?'
'That's practically Zen.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

Do we die to live or do we live to die?
- Jason Olscamp

Life is a game: there are winners, losers, and cheaters.
- Jason Olscamp

You can only get what you give.
- Laura Barclay

If you assume things, you make an ass out of u and me.
- Unknown

Ah yes, divorce. From the Latin word meaning 'to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet.'

- Robin Williams

There's a rumour that there's a rumour going on around here.
- Brian ????

The prophets have always made God's insights visible to man by attributing their own insights to him.
- Karen Armstong, "A History of God"

'. . . only the weak hate weakness; only the wounded condemn the pain of others.'
- Michael Moorcock, "Constant Fire"

'You speak of Rights and Precedents, woman. You refer to Choice and Education. But what if they were the very chains that enslave the spirit? I offer you neither security nor responsibility, save the security of knowing your own identity and the responsibility of maintaining it. I offer you Dignity.'
- Michael Moorcock, "Constant Fire"

. . . history taught a cruel lesson. it said -- often in words of blood -- that the true king is the one who gets crowned.

- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and the other allow himself to be walked on.
- Mercedes Lackey, "Owlflight"

At the next desk, a tired dwarf was arguing with a vampire. 'Look,' he said, 'it's not murder. You're dead already, right?'
'He stuck them right into me!'
'Well, I've been down to interview the owner of the plant and he says it was an accident. he said he's got nothing against vampires at all. He says he was merely carrying the box of HB Eraser Tips and tripped on the edge of your cloak.'
'I don't see why I can't work where I like!'
'Yes . . . but in a pencil factory?'

- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

The corporal manning -- or in this case dwarfing -- the desk was having trouble.
'Again? how many times have you been killed this week?'
'I was just minding my own business!' said the unseen complainer.
'Stacking garlic? You're a vampire, aren't you? I mean, lets see what jobs you've been doing . . . Post sharpener for a fencing farm, sunglass tester for Argus Opticians . . . It is me, or is their some underlying trend here?'
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

The troll turned back to address a worried-looking monk in a brown cassock. 'And?' he said.
'Best if he tells it himself,' said the monk. 'I only work on the next bench.' He put a small jar of dust on the desk. It had a bow tied around it.
'I want to complain most emphatically,' said the dust in a shrill voice. 'I was working five minutes, then splash. It's going to take me days to get back into shape!'
'Working where?' said the troll.
'Nonesuch Ecclastical Supplies,' said the worried monk, helpfully.
'Holy water section,' said the vampire.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

Thirty light years from here, if there are any alien astronomers with radio telescopes, they might be picking up the first episodes of Gilligan's Island, which might explain why we haven't been visited.
- Jaymie Mathews

All jokes are half truth.
- Unknown

Responsibility ends with a corpse.
- Patricia Anthony, "The Holes Where Children Lie"

"Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else."
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

Whores were ideal women, just as soldiers were ideal men.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

As our eyes grow accustomed to sight, they armour themselves against wonder.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle that had cleared the fields, of the labour that had gone into the modern world they rode on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have power now. Who cares what went before?
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

"I know I never saw you. I bur everyone inn my personal vision. I never get their own music . . ."
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

"Humans are lucky to be connected in any way at all, even by the table between them."
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at all. It number his mind, but the anathesis was not sufficiently potent to deliver it form awareness. It could still recognise its bondage.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment.
- Karen Armstrong, "A History of God"

'MIND TELLING US WHAT THE REALITY IS LIKE AROUND HERE?'
The pen wrote +++ On A Scale Of One To Ten -- Query +++
'FINE,' Ridcully shouted.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

He who spares the bad injures the good.
- Publius Syrus

Ambition is like Tinkerbell -- if you stop believing in it, it dies.
- Tad Williams

Time is the fire in which we burn.
- Star Trek, "Generations"

The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination.
- Star Trek, "Deep Space Nine"

"I want to leave this goddamned place," I said. It was the first time I'd really known what I wanted, and maybe that's what growing up means."
- Patricia Anthony, "The Last Flight From Llano"

With the first link, the fist chance is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all.
- Judge Aaron Satie

In our sad social condition, our only consolation is the expectancy of another life.
- Martin Luther

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are led daily to execution.
- Walter Raleigh

Civilisation is the process of setting man free from men.
- Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"

He suspected that this was the last time she would ever confront him like this. He also knew that there was nothing within himself that he could summon to meet her.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

"We all want to be chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently."
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

Everybody had to believe in magic. Nobody believed in magic. He didn't believe in magic. Magic didn't believe in magic.
- Leonard Cohen, "The Favourite Game"

The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
- Winston Churchill

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
- Bertrand Russel

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
- Childhood nursery rhyme

Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
- Lenny Bruce

Never walk when you can run.
- Unknown

So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
- Albert Einstein

Well, there may be other ways to God, but no gentleman would ever take them.
- Unknown Anglican

One either pursues ones dreams or ones memories.
- Sean Russel, "Beneath The Vaulted Hills"

"I am looking for an interlocking component to help me procreate."
- Chris Crewe

Memory is a fiction, a narrative we write and rewrite to explain an ever changing present, a story in which we are the hero, the victim, the wronged, or the incomparable lover. And if memory is a fiction, then what is history?
- Sean Russel, "Beneath The Vaulted Hills"

Youth, it seemed, had an undeniable need of company. It was rather like misery in that regard.
- Sean Russell, "Beneath The Vaulted Hills"

If it isn't true, it is a happy invention.
- Italian Proverb

Make yourself into a sheep, and you'll find a wolf nearby.
- Russian Proverb

"I am only saying that men go seeking the object of their desire. Perhaps even the creation of that desire. But what they find is invariably different than they imagined or hoped. This strange propensity of mankind is what makes us children -- it is also what makes us great.
- Sean Russell, "Beneath The Vaulted Hills"

Faces we see, heart we know not.
- Spanish Proverb

Forever is a long bargain
- German Proverb

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
- Paul Valery

The head is always the dupe of the heart.
- La Rochefoucauld

Every weakling has a tyrant.
- Italian Proverb

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.
- Erasmus

There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.
- La Rochfoucauld

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tell me who you're friends are and I'll tell you who you are.
- Cervantes

Judicial reform is no sport for the short-winded.
- Arthur Vanderbilt

Injustice is relatively easy to bear. It is justice that hurts.
- H L Mencken

"You might was well dive into an ocean as try to stop Eldrich. Come to your senses, man, a mage is a force of nature."
- Sean Russell, "Beneath The Vaulted Hills"

"Save the indians! Serve them the hearts of Jesuits!"
- Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers"

Perhaps she meant: Come on a journey with me, a journey only strangers can take, and we will remember it when we are ourselves again, and therefore never be merely ourselves again.
- Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers"

If I am not enjoying sunsets, then for whom do they burn?
- Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers"

What is most original in man's nature if often what is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique.
- Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers"

Looking truth in the fact is not a prime activity of governments.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Psykosis"

The only thing that is impossible is surviving.
- Jason Olscamp

Can the future be truly shorn
From a life to which we're born?
Is each of us a creature free
Or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter,
Without freedom nothing matters.
- Dean Koontz

The word apocalyptic has interesting origins. It comes from the Greek apokalupsis, which mean revelation. This derives from the Greek apokaluptein, meaning uncover or disclose. Apo is a Greek prefix meaning from, derived from. Kaluptein means to cover. This is cognate with Kalube, which is cabin, and Kalumma which means woman's veil. Thus apocalyptic describes what happens when a woman's veil is lifted.
- Leonard Cohen, "Beautiful Losers"

I'm rather sorry for them myself.
I'm sorry for anything that comes in contact with humanity.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Psykosis"

"Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence."
- Last Morse Code message of the French Coast Guard (January 31, 1997)

Never cross an idealist. They're kind of hard to rouse, but they're the worlds nastiest beasties if you do. Nobody spreads fire and sword like a really sincere pacifist on a warpath.
- Wilhemina Baird, "Psykosis"

Duties can sometimes be like a pair of comfortable old shoes. We're reluctant to put them aside even when we have new ones.
- David and Leigh Eddings, "Polgara the Sorceress"

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side, then this is a natural bonus.
- Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"

When you get to the bottom of it, only half of what we remember actually happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our eyes and in the eyes of others.
- David and Leigh Eddings, "Polgara the Sorceress"

"That's the centre of all power, Aunt Pol," he mused. "We can try to act civilized and polite, but at the bottom of it all, the power of any ruler is based on threat."
- David and Leigh Eddings, "Polgara the Sorceress"

A normal humans grasp of reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.
- David and Leigh Eddings, "Polgara the Sorceress"

It's a part of the nature of adolescents to test limits to see how far they can go. The wise parent doesn't permit that to get out of hand. Gentle firmness at the early stages of this testing is far kinder in the long run than they inevitable harshness that becomes necessary later on.
- David and Leigh Eddings, "Polgara the Sorceress"

Look around you. What you see is that which has persisted.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

I want to know what God knows. Everything else is just details.
- Albert Einstein

To know what is right and not to do it, is the worst cowardice.
- John F Kennedy

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
- Alfred North Whitehead

He knows. And knowing, he acted. That is the very definition of a rational man.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

I don't deny God, its just that I don't know if He created Man, or Man created Him.
- Dostoevesky

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Voltaire

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
- George Bernard Shaw

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
- Irving Kristol

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.
- Erica Jong

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
- George Bernard Shaw

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.
- Charles Schultz, Creator of "Peanuts"

One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us.
- Virgil A. Kraft

If you want to feel rich, just count all of the things you have that money can't buy.
- Anonymous

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
- Abraham Lincoln

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
- Ayn Rand

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
- David Dinkins, former NYC Mayor

One does evil enough when one does nothing good.
- German Proverb

To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer.
- Ayn Rand

Add a few drops of malice to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
- Eric Hoffler

Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent
- Ayn Rand

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
- Eric Hoffler

Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.
- Eric Hoffler

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
- Eric Hoffler

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.
- Eric Hoffler

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it
- Eric Hoffler

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
- Eric Hoffler

[the intellectual] would rather be persecuted than ignored.
- Eric Hoffler

It is easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor.
- Eric Hoffler

No one has a right to happiness.
- Eric Hoffler

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
- Eric Hoffler

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- H L Mencken

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
- H L Mencken

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
- H L Mencken

It ain't a crime if you don't get caught.
- Unknown (part of a song)

The thing that makes you exception, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
- Lorraine Hansberry

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
- Omar Bradley

'Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out'
- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason.
- Martin Luther

A man does not die for something which he himself does not believe in.
- Hitler, "Mein Kampf"

The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.
- Rev. Jerry Falwell

The inability or unwillingness to hate makes a person worthless. If we do not hate detestable things, the quality of our character is suspect. The Bible commands that we hate.
- H A Dobbs

"Think not that I come to send peace on earth. I come not to send peace, but a sword."
- Attributed to Jesus Christ (Matthew 10:34)

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.
- H L Mencken

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
- from the bible (Psalms 137:9)

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
- Eugene Ionesco

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest idea of carrying it out in practice.
- Otto Van Bismark

'If I'd had to buy you, you wouldn't have been worth the price.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Wyrd Sisters"

His only fear was that if push came to shove, he might turn out to be even better than he thought himself to be.
- Orson Scott Card, "Heartfire"

Just because your thoughts seem to be the whole world doesn't mean they are visible to anyone else.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

I don't care if he loves me, if Ginny loves me, if anyone loves me. I'm just a man, caught in the usual trap that lies between friendship and sex.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

No one believes anyone who disagrees with them had actually understood the subtleties of their reasoning. Which is why, in the end, we probably will all perish.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

"Ask the average man for one good reason to promote humanity's eternal survival. Don't waste your time waiting for an answer."
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

Imagine.
Imagine if death were only a gateway to another life.
Then, no matter what, you could never escape from yourself. horrible.
- William Barton and Michael Capobianco, "Alpha Centauri"

"I can't understand divorcing after twenty years of marriage. You're life's already over anyway."
- Laura Barclay

. . . 'the hardest sort of magic is the sort we don't use at all'
- Terry Pratchett, "Wyrd Sisters"

The fear bred by ignorance is more crippling than the wounds earned in gaining knowledge.
- Irene Radford, "The Perfect Princess"

After all, it is setting a high price on our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.
- Michael de Montaigne

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.
- John Steinbeck

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
- G K Chesteron

"the very best thing about being old," Lal said, "is the privilege of remembering exactly what you choose to remember, and no more."
- Peter S Beagle, "Lal and Soukyan"

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.
- James Broughton

All stories are lies, just because they are stories.
- Peter S Beagle, "Lal and Soukyan"

There was nothing, and there was a heritage nearly forgotten yet newly restored. We should have lost, but failure was too hard a foe.
- Cheryl J Franklin, "Fire Get"

When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.
- Lord Falkland

Children demand impossible things of themselves in secret; only they know why.
- Peter S Beagle, "Choushi-wau's Story"

"But as members of the human race, we're all pretty much criminals, in one context or another."
- Michael Kanaly, "Thoughts of God"

Normal people, he knew, have no idea about the kind of world they live in.
- Michael Kanaly, "Thoughts of God"

Is knowledge of physical death such a corrupting agent that rational thought is impossible on the physical plane?
- Michael Kanaly, "Thoughts of God"

If you see a bandwagon, it's too late.
- Sir James Goldsmith

I wash everything on the gentle cycle. It's much more humane.
- Unknown

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.
- H Jackson Brown, Jr

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.
- B C Forbes

All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral or fattening.
- Alexander Wollcott

A consultant is someone who saves his client almost enough to pay for his fee.
- Arnold Glasgow

Learn a new language and get a new soul.
- Czech Proverb

The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount is has the nerve to collect.
- Sam Ewing

Heredity is what sets parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
- Laurence Peter

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
- George Patton

The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.
- Japanese Proverb

The manner in which it is given is worth more than the gift.
- Pierre Corneille

Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.
- Thomas Szusz

I knew I was an unwanted baby when my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
- Joan Rivers

A man's greatest strength develops at the point where he overcomes his greatest weakness.
- Elmer G Letterman

It's hard to detect good luck -- it looks so much like something you've earned.
- Fred A Clark

Your friend is the man who knows all about you and still likes you.
- Elbert Hubbard

The nice thing about meditation is that it makes doing nothing quite respectable.
- Paul Pean

If Noah had been truly wise, he would have swatted those two flies.
- Helen Castle

A stumble may prevent a fall.
- English Proverb

If you truly wish to understand something, try to change it.
- Kurt Lewis

The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.
- Martina Navratilova

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
- Woody Allen

Is evil simply a goal unto itself?
- Michael Kanaly, "Thoughts of God"

Whoever says that money can't buy you happiness doesn't know where to shop.
- Telegraph Magazine

The more original the discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
- Arthur Koestler

Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game"

It all confirmed his theory that people spent large chunks of their time learning things that wee absolutely useless to living. That people, even the supposedly smart ones, had no idea why they were here, and knew even less about what it was they were supposed to be doing.
- Michael Kanaly, "Thoughts of God"

Those who live by compassion are often canonised. Those who like by justice are often crucified.
- J D Crossan

"In my experience, influence is power."
- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game"

"I think you underestimate Ender."
"But I fear I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?"
- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game"

One sacrifices convenience for real power . . .
- Melissa Scott, "Empress of Earth"

"Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilisation."
- Daniel Quinn, "Ishmael"

"I don't think you can start wanting something until you know it exists."
- Daniel Quinn, "Ishmael"

"I asked you a question. A question isn't an argument unless you think you know my answer, and I assure you, Styrka, that you do not."
- Orson Scott Card, "Speaker For The Dead"

"This is how humans are: We question all beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question."
- Orson Scott Card, "Speaker For The Dead"

"I think we've taken a step towards something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives greatness."
- Orson Scott Card, "Speaker For The Dead"

"When it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure a crime to examine the laws of heat."
- John Morley

We do not inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
- Haida Indian Saying

When life demands more of people than they demand of life -- as is ordinarily the case -- what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death.
- Tom Robbins

The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands of mouths.
- Julian Simon

Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chasity.
- Remy de Gourmont

We sometimes get all the information, but we refuse to get the message.
- Cullen Hightower

Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.
- Henry David Thoreau

It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.
- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

. . . in matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
- Gore Vidal.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
- H L Mencken

I really don't think I'm all that good . . . But someone who's competent in an age of incomptetency appears to be extraordinary.
- Billy Joel

It isn't illusion. That I write is a reality. Life is art and science. Look at your hand. What do you see? Flesh? Bone? Atoms? It's all moving. Electrons and quarks exist in constant motion. You think you know what reality is? Reality is an artefact of our sense.
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

"But who is a fool?"
"Any of us. Mostly those who never wonder if they're fools."
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

We can't see the atoms dance: we can scarely see the stars. We're suspended between these two abysses of the infinitely small and the infinitely vast, and we deceive ourselves if we believe too much in the blue sky and the green earth.
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

It's all one system, from the dustmote to the star. It's only that our systems are too small.
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

I think two kinds of humanity create events: fools and visionaries. Chaos itself may be an illusion. Perhaps what we do does matter. I think it's a chance worth taking. I'd hate to leave it all to fools.
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

Politics are about power. We cannot escape that truth or its consequences. We dream of a better world, but it is in Utopia -- that is, nowhere.
- Denis Wiliam Brogan

'We had a missionary society, and we collected money so that we could purchase certain basic comforts.'
'And these "poor" ones, they exist so that you mighty exercise your own impulses towards "nobility" and "self-sacrifice." I understand!'
- Michael Moorcock, "The End of All Songs

Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.
- Rudolph Rummel

Do you realise if it weren't for Edison, we'd be watching TV by candle light?
- Al Boliska

Marriage is not a word but a sentence.
- Anonymous

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.
- Bob Hope

Headaches are all in your mind.
- Anonymous

Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?
- Al Boliska

"Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods. Crossing the border, you can't help but meet them"
- Daniel Quinn, "The Story of B"

"We are unable to alienate ourselves from nature or to "live against" it. We can no more alienate ourselves from nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we're seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable -- and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way."
- Daniel Quinn, "The Story of B"

Real secrets can be kept by publishing them on billboards.
- Daniel Quinn, "The Story of B"

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
- Unknown

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
- Anonymous

"Once upon a time is the only true enchantment the elves left us, the gift of truthful lies and travel in time and space."
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

"And that is history but another myth, with the poetry taken out?"
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

"You know that's all myths could be. Truth. A system of truth made as simple as its hearers."
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

"It's so easy to take what others give us. Gifts are hard to say no to."
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

Michael Celluci is an honourable man, and the opinions of honourable men are sometimes all we have to define ourselves by.
- Tanya Huff, "Blood Debt"

"Each of us singly wields the power output of a Mesopotamian Empire -- without even thinking about it. We can afford to."
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"

"Simple things are almost the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible."
- Daniel Quinn, "My Ishmael"

Why he struggled with the world of women, he did not know. It was not for him. He did not speak the language and remained a foreigner, always with the attendant feeling of being in another culture.
- Sean Russell, "Sea Without A Shore"

There is an accumulative cruelty is a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.
- Lord Halifax

In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker.
- Frederic Bastiat

The history of the race, and each individuals experience, are think with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie well told is immortal.
- Mark Twain

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.
- Anonymous

Our whole evolution up to this point shows that human groups spontaneously evolve patterns of behaviour, as well as patterns of training people for that behaviour, which tend on the balance to lead people to create rather than destroy. Humans are, on net balance, builders rather than destroyers.
- Julian Simon

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
- Benjamin Disraeli

There is one right I would not grant anyone, and that is the right to be indifferent.
- Elie Wiesel.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor -- it is a fixed characteristic of the human race.
- George Orwell

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
- Alfred North Whitehead

It now costs more to amuse a child than it once did to educate his father.
- Anonymous

The desire to belong is partly the desire to lose oneself.
- Eric Hoffler

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
- John Morley

The saviour who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of humanity as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
- Eric Hoffler

Unsafe sex is both suicidal and homicidal
- Ronny Galicki

. . . there is no alienation that a little power won't cure.
- Eric Hoffler

Hate has a reason for everything
But love is unreasonable
- V. Raiuhes Ahaefuthe

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
- Cicero

Sometimes people fight intolerance in a rather intolerance manner.
- Paul Camdus

In history there were any number of rulers whose perception of events ere so far removed from reality that it led to calamity. Prince Wilam did not want to be one of those -- at any cost. Even if it meant giving up the world as he desired it to be.
- Sean Russell, "Sea Without A Shore"

A touchstone to determine the worth of an "intellectual" -- find out how he feels about astrology.
- Robert Heinlein

When a man stops trying to prove he is a man, he is a man.
- D Talmudge Gasnell

The interpretation of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.
- Robert G Ingersoll

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled in dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of my being in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not just exist. I shall use my time.
- Jack London

"But if the worst should occur, do not let silence be your final word."
- Sean Russell, "Sea Without A Shore"

"Think of the knowledge that will be lost!"
"Yes, far too much knowledge and not nearly enough wisdom."
- Sean Russell, "Sea Without A Shore"

The current state of knowledge can be summarised thus:
In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so difficult to believe in people.
- Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids"

Atheism is a non-prophet organisation.
- Anonymous

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
- H L Mencken

If atheism is a lack of belief in God, than baldness is a lack of belief in hair.
- Jean Paul Satre

The church is near,
but the roads are icy.
The tavern is far,
But I will walk carefully.
- Ukranian Proverb

Philosophy: questions that may never be answered.
Religion: answers that may never be questioned.
- Anonymous

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins have been reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human has ever been reported to have learned dolphinese.
- Carl Sagan

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual but permitted to a mob.
- Ayn Rand

If you have to resort to violence, you've already lost.
- Sean Connery, "Rising Sun"

Too bad the people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.
- George Burns

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss in life is what dies inside us when we live.
- Norman Cousins

To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned.
- Barry Hughart, "The Story of the Stone"

When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming.
When nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.
- Barry Hughart, "The Story of the Stone"

"Godhood cannot be refused," Envy said, and the wry tone of his voice suggested he was not talking about Yu Lan when he added, "But it need not be sought."
- Barry Hughart, "Eight Skilled Gentleman"

Knowledge gained out of fear or hope of reward holds you in ignorance.
- Frank Herbet, "The God Makers"

Wordly use of power can destroy an angel. This is the lesson of peace. Loving peace and pursuing peace are not enough. One must also love one's fellows. Thus one learns the dynamic and loving conflict that we call life.
- Frank Herbet, "The God Makers"

"The fact that a name exists for something does not mean that thing exists."
- Frank Herbet, "The God Makers"

. . . "The rewards are great if one succeeds, but the rewards are great because so few succeed."
- Og Mandino, "The Greatest Salesman in the World"

It isn't intellect that connects us to other people, it is feeling.
- Charles Fowler

All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
- Edgar Allen Poe

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- John Updike

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
- Henrik Tikkamen

The perception of beauty is a moral test.
- Henry David Thoreau

Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't put his pants on.
- Arthur Watson

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.
- Lily Tomlin

Why should intelligent species be immune to the threat of extinction that looms over every species that ever came to be?
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

The reality of the other person is not what he reveals to you but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, it you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.
- Kahil Gibran

And what did it matter is his tears tonight had self-pity in them? She had shed a few like that herself. Grief, she reminded herself, is almost only for the mourners loss.
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it.
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

Food only looks good to a hungry man.
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

"You can deny any sacrifice by claiming that it made the sufferer feel so good to do that it really wasn't a sacrifice at all, but just another selfish act."
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

People should only be blamed or praised for what they meant to do.
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

<So you, too, are a believer.>
<I understand belief.>
<No -- you desire belief.>
<I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that's what faith is.>
<Or deliberate insanity.>
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

"If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep it a secret then everybody is a fool."
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

"When you don't understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them?"
. . . "You don't take the blame," he answered, "But you still take the responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused."
- Orson Scott Card, "Xenocide"

It wasn't that he lacked faith. But faith wasn't enough. He wanted knowledge.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

The smug look of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

"Mythology's just the folk tales of people who won 'cos they had bigger swords."
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches, they have you a bigger shovel.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

And the trouble with not asking for anything in return was that you sometimes didn't get it.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

"The supernatural can sometimes be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science.
- Barry Hughart, "Bridge of Birds"

"Nothing on the face of earth -- and I do mean nothing -- is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be true, and you and I are wandering blindfolded through a myth designed by a maniac."
- Barry Hughart, "Bridge of Birds"

If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?
- Bumper Sticker

"Well, it's an idea, and even a bad idea is better than none," said Master Li. "Error can point the way to truth, while empty handedness can only lead to more empty handedness or to a career in politics."
- Barry Hughart, "Bridge of Birds"

Mediocrity recognises nothing higher than itself. Talent instantly recognises genius.
- Peter James, "The Truth"

By right means, if you can, but by any means make money.
- Horace

Languages serve not only to express though but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
- Bertrand Russell

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mid is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
- Dan Simmons, "Hyperion"

Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
- Ayn Rand

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"DOS computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
- The New York Times, November 26th, 19996

As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.
- Thomas Paine

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.
- Demosthenes

The mind of each man is the man himself.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

I have a deep distrust of anyone who is not insecure.
- Roger A Bird

Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Government the real power lies in the majority of the community...
- James Madison

...one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
- Arthur Koestler

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
- Bertrand de Jouvenal

Beware the fury of a patient man.
- John Dryden

It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them.
- Francois de La Rochefoucald

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
- Graham Greene

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.
- Henrik Ibsen

Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.
- Robert Heinlein

Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away!
-Robert Fulghum

If there is no struggle there is no progress.
- Frederick Douglass

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
- George Bernard Shaw

Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.
- Richard Nixon

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
- George Orwell

Truth against the world.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

In a general view, there are few conquests that repay the charge of making them, and mankind are pretty well convinced that it can never be worth their while to go to war for profit's sake. If they are made war upon, their country invaded, or their existence at stake, it is their duty to defend and preserve themselves, but in every other light, and from every other cause, is war inglorious and detestable.
- Thomas Paine

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
- Robert G. Ingersoll

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
- Robert Heinlein

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
- Ben Franklin

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.
- Simonides

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
- Kimberly Johnson

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
- M. Cartmill

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
- Francis Bacon

Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
- James Fenimore Cooper

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
- Alfred North Whitehead

If all mankind were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, then he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
- John Stuart Mill

Don't lie and you won't have to remember any.
- Chinese Proverb

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.
- Julian Simon

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen with as much power and freedom as comparts with order and the rights of others, the institution renders him truly a free man. He is left to peruse his means of happiness in his own manner.
- James Fenimore Cooper

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.
- Julian Simon

Just about anyone can go out and get a deer. If nothing else, you can hit it with your car.
- Linda Haccius

"Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal to actually implement them come together."
- Robin Hobb, "Ship of Magic"

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
- J A Schumpter

Perception was the goal and all that really mattered. Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.
- Terry Goodkind, "Soul of Fire"

"Once you place the crown of liar on your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time."
- Terry Goodkind, "Soul of Fire"

A man's hatred is always concentrated on that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.
- Carl Jung

Destiny is the invention of the cowardly and the resigned.
- Ignazio Silone

It does not matter what a man hates, provided he hates something.
- Samuel Butler

The highest stage in moral culture at which we arrive at is when we recognise that we ought to control our own thoughts.
- Charles Darwin

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it."
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong.
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

"Knowledge is just opinion you trust enough to act upon."
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

"Even gentle people recognise that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die."
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

"Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of an unbearable agony. It's not a noble decision to let someone with more value go on living instead of you."
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

"I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were imperfect and . . . now I realise that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."
- Orson Scoot Card, "Children of the Mind"

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not human, they are made so.
- Jaques Barzun

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
- Oscar Wilde

We live in an age where pizza gets to your door before the police.
- Jeff Marder

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
- Oscar Wilde

"We tell lies when we are afraid . . . afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger."
- Tad Williams, "To Green Angel Tower"

Show me the books he loves, and I shall show the man far better than through mortal friends.
- S W Mitchell

Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people want.
- Cilve Barnes

Civilisation is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilisation is what happens on the banks.
- Will Durant

Absence extinguishes small passion but increases great ones, as the wind blows out a candle, and blows in a fire.
- Francois de La Rouchefoucauld

You should emulate your heroes, but don't carry it too far. Especially if they are dead.
- Anonymous

Think big. Pollute the Mississippi.
- Anonymous

Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
- Anonymous

A fools brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into Pedantry. Hence university education.
- George Bernard Shaw

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object ot it.
- George Bernard Shaw

It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom to never use either.
- Mark Twain

Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
- Mark Twain

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
- Mark Twain

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
- Mark Twain

The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.
- Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad"

I have never met a greater monster or miracle than myself.
- Montaigne

'The good are innocent, and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad"

The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates

If all else fails, immortality may be achieved by spectacular error.
- J K Galbraith

If thine enemy has wronged thee, by each of his children a drum.
- Chinese Proverb

Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
- David Hume

Horse snese is what keeps a horse from betting on people.
- W C Fields

Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
- Oscar Wilde

I have simple tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
- Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temter when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
- Oscar Wilde

If you can lead it to water and force it to drink, it isn't a horse.
- Unknown

Certainly there are things in life that one can't buy, but it's very funny -- did you ever try buying them without money?
- Ogden Nash

At group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
- The Washington Post

Garbage In = Gospel Out
- Anonymous

In our civilisation, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honoured that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
- Ambrose Bierce

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
- Lily Tomlin

When in doubt, use brute force.
- Ken Thompson

Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
- Albert Einstein

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in love is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade though who's steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
- Anna Loise Strong

Indeed, what could Reason ever accomplish for mankind by itself, without Passion to drive it on?
- David Brin, "Earth"

"Anyone who tries to predict the future is a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humour is just stupid."
- David Brin, "Earth"

Only when you truly study a subject do you find out how little you knew all along.
- David Brin, "Earth"

Ah, he thought, but we are legion. I contain multitudes. And some of the people making up "me" aren't grown-ups at all.
- David Brin, "Earth"

We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us lets our monsters become real.
- David Brin, "Earth"

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
- Machiavelli

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
- Charles Ketering

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
- W Maughan

You will not become a saint through other people's sins.
- Anton Chekov

All history is little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.
- Voltaire

There is no such thing as truth.
- Adolph Hitler

Teachers open the door. You enter it yourself.
- Chinese Proverb

"Jesus is not God because God is far beyond our understanding."
- Reverend Bill Phillips

"Words can never express the depth of religious conviction. They never have. That's another reason why we have art, and poetry -- because people can't nail it down. And, God help us, I hope we never can nail it down."
- Reverend Bill Phillips

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.
- David Brin, "Earth"

. . . but talent was a poor substitute for knowing what you were doing!
- David Brin, "Earth"

Clearly, he knew the deeper truth -- that all theories are only metaphors, and at best helpful models of the world.
- David Brin, "Earth"

Without observers, not only is a falling tree without sound . . . it's a concept without meaning.
- David Brin, "Earth"

Could a peasant, if the Aeneid was read to him, pronounce that poem to be utterly faultless, or even assign it to its proper rank among the production of human wit; he, who had never seen any other production?
- David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion"

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
- Thomas Sowell

Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
- Thomas Sowell

Poverty is the mother of vice.
- Marcus Aurelius

A little philosophy makes a man an atheist: a great deal reconciles him to religion.
- Francis Bacon

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous: those in philosophy only ridiculous
- David Hume

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
- George Orwell

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
- Eric Hoffler

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
- Samuel Johnson

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature: that of laying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
- Unknown

We prefer the past to the future, because the past has been tried before.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

"The truth is like sunlight, and people used to think it was good for you."
- from "King of the Hill"

"But everything is useful," he said, "it must be or it just isn't anything. It doesn't count"
- Malcolm Quantrill

Business men tell us they ought to be running the country, as if they weren't already. They tell us they should govern it because they are practical and efficient. This is business efficiency: an executive says "Look, we've cornered the market at last. Now that we've eliminated our competitors, we can increase prices as we like. But to do that, we have to keep selling. Our products last a year. If we make it last nine moths, we shall increase our sales by 25%."
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

It is no use appealing to honour now, however. That's rather like warning the motorist to drive carefully, when its really the roads that are dangerous, and the type of car.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

Or what is it you buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
- Shelley

It's like a metaphor for our society: cased in armour, explosive, unnecessarily complicated, antiquated, preserved against all reason. Our society had two engines too: an exchange system, and a money system that complicates and messes up the exchange to the point of ultimate destruction.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

" . . .talking wealth from the poor in the west and giving it to the rich in the east."
- Unknown (on Foreign Aid)

. . . Mixed in one might torrent did appear,
Some flying from things they feared,
And some seeking the object of another's fear.
- Shelley

The very notions of "modern" and "up-to-date" are substitutes for thought -- themselves unexamined ideas used to promote unthinkingness.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

It is not change that is destructive, but inflexible resistance to it.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

The difference between a successful inventor and an unsuccessful one may be his powers of persuasion.
- Herbert Lomas, "Who Needs Money?"

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"

'A few twenty mile runs and the dean'd be a different man.'
'Well, yes,' said the Bursar. 'He'd he dead.'
'He'd be healthy.'
'But still dead.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in street cleaning, fruit picking, and subway guitar playing have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"

'The man was mad!'
'He had a very tidy mind,' said the Bursar.
'Same thing.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"

CREATION IS NOT SOMETHING THAT GODS DO, IT IS SOMETHING THAT THEY ARE.
- Terry Pratchett, "Strata"

"He's old. And old men like to think that everything's coming to an end. It makes it a little easier to let things go."
- Cilve Barker, "Sacrament"

Perhaps that was the definition of home, at least for men of his inclination: the solid, certain spot from which all roads led.
- Cilve Barker, "Sacrament"

Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing that there was some revelation still unfound, than to peruse and possess such a wretched certainty.
- Cilve Barker, "Sacrament"

Perhaps the coming challenge is not, as Yeats put it, that 'the centre will not hold,' but that the boundaries are blurring.
- Cilve Barker, "Sacrament"

Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
- Finagles Creed

If God lived on earth, people would knock out all his windows.
- Yiddish Proverb

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
- William James

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
- Jules Feiffer

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
- Benjamin Disraeli

When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.
- Jon Carroll

Love at first sight is one of the greatest labour saving devices the world has ever seen.
- Anonymous

Condense soup, not books!
- Anonymous

Tact: the unsaid part of what you're thinking,.
- Anonymous

It's bad luck to be superstitious
- Andrew Mathis

Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
-Anonymous

-----------END OF BOOK 3!!!!!!!!!!! ---------------

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
- Neitzsche

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
- Abby Hoffman

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
- Samuel Beckett

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
- Anonymous

Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
- R Geis

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
- Jules de Gaultier

God is a polytheist
- Anonymous

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but by then I couldn't give up because I was famous.
- Unknown

Modern man is the missing link between apes and humans.
- Unknown

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson

The trouble with being poor is that it took up all your time
- Anonymous

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
- Thomas Edison

When ever anyone says "theoretically" they really mean "not really."
- Dave Parnas

The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
- Anonymous

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- Anatole France

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
- Gore Vidal

'Then we die gloriously!'
'There's an important word in that sentence,' said the captain, 'and it's not the word "gloriously."'
- Terry Pratchett, "Only You Can Save Mankind"

'Well, everyone thinks they're a bit mad . . . it's part of being normal.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Only You Can Save Mankind"

'So what? Dying's easy.'
'I know. It's living that's the problem.'
- Terry Pratchett, "Only You Can Save Mankind"

How do you think like a human? Go into madness first, probably, then out the other side.
- Terry Pratchett, "Only You Can Save Mankind"

Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person's attempt to understand the universe.
- Dan Simmons, "Endymion"

Man's tragedy is that he was once a child.
- Neitzsche

Why write a book? No one has asked for it.

Especially those to whom it is directed.

Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in the world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
- Franz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks"

"Somtimes . . .dreams are all that seperate us from the machines."
- Dan Simmons, "The Fall of Hyperion"

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the things nature replaces it with.
- Tenessee Williams

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which to die.
- Unknnown

When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to *seem* true.
- Bertrand Russel

Why is it the biggest outcries against same sex marriage always come from places attempting to uphold the sacred bond between a man and his cousin?
-Will Durst

Laws are only words, words written on paper, words that change on societies whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges and policemen. Anyone who thinks that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic station, is a fool.
- John J Miller

First they went after the Communists, and I did not stand up, because I was not a Communist. Then they went after the homosexuals and infirm, and I did not stand up, because I was neither. Then they went after the Jews, and I did not stand up, because I was not a Jew. Then they went after the Catholics, and I did not stand up, because I was Protestant. Finally, they went after me, and there was no one left to stand up for me.
- Pastor Martin Neimoller

Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL
IS OTHER PEOPLE?
'Yes. yes, of course.'
Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL COME TO LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

"Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son m'etier" (God will forgive me. It's his profession)
- Heinrich Heine

"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain -- and most fools do."
- Dale Carnegie

"There is no religion higher than truth"
- Unknown

A journey to truth is a journey
without distance to a goal that
has never changed.
- Unknown

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it."
- Unknown

----

The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best.
- Thomas Sowell

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness - Joseph Conrad

I have laboured sore and suffered death,
And now I rest and draw my breath;
But I shall come and call right soon
Heaven and death and Hell to doom;
And then shall know both devil and man
What I was and What I am
- Anon, 15th century

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
- Eric Hoffer

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
- Eric Hoffer

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H.L. Mencken

...any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system
- Thomas Paine

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows
- Robert Frost

"The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living."
- Angela Carter (1940-1992), British author.

In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will's somewhat - somewhat, too, the power -
And thus we half-men struggle
- Robert Browning "Andrea Del Sarto"

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
- Lewis Carrol, "Jabberwocky"

The fault was grave! I might have known
What far too soon, alas, I learned --
The heart can bind itself alone
And faith may oft be unreturned.
- Matthew Arnold, "Isolation. To Marguerite."

Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made
- Emily Dickinson

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
- Albert Jay Nock

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget
- Jean-Paul Sartre

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."
- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man" 1914

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
- Oscar Wilde (The Ballad of Reading Gaol).

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream"
- Shakespeare

I cannot describe life without you because if I did I would never be able to live in a world where you exist
- Unknown

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."
- Vine Deloria, Jr.

"There are plenty of people in this world who will try to hurt you. don't help them by hurting yourself."
- Anonymous

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
- Winston Churchill

Life is what you make of it. If you are persistant in your beliefs, then there may be problems. If you constantly capitulate, then there will be problems
- Unknown

To survive we escape fate. But if you escape fate, whose life do you step into?
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

Athos said: "I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead, he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to me."
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

Find a way to make beauty necessary. Find a way to make necessity beautiful.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

"Jakob, try to be buried in ground that will remember you."
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

"The great mystery of wood is not that it burns but that it floats."
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
- Thomas Sowell

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Irrisistable, it melts the ground like water through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling its name.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

In the valley, charred ruins, blackened stone, a terrible silence. A place so empty it was not even haunted.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion -- planned, timed, wired carefully -- not the burnt door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
- Robert Lynd

"Jakob, when Nikos died, I asked my father if he believed in God. He said: How do we know there is a God? Because he keeps disappearing."
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

It is not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat but the past we know.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"


And even if an act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. No act of violence is ever resolved. When the ones who can forgive no longer speak, there is only silence.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

It is not a persons depths you must discover but their accent. Find their path from depth to accent.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

I think a child knows intuitively that its the most sacred sacred places that are the most frightening.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

"Who dares to believe he will be saved twice?"
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

What is love at first sight but the response of a soul crying out with sudden regret because it realises it has never before been recognized?
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
- Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"

The Secret of Golf: A reporter was interviewing Jack Nicklaus. He said, "Jack, you are spectacular, your name is synonymous with the game of golf. You really know your way around the course. What is your secret?" To which Jack replied, "The holes are numbered!"
- Unknown

I here about the Ozone Layer, Deforestation, Famine, Wars, Floods, Epidemics and I look out my window and I see the kids on the lawn the sun out and birds chirping. Where is all this s**t happening. I think CNN is making it up for ratings
- Bill Hicks

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
- Nathaniel Branden

Death does funny things to people, especially the part of death where the corpse reanimates and tries to kill the living.
- From the "All Flesh Must Be Eaten" RPG

"Silence is the language God speaks. Everything else is a bad interpretation."
- Unknown

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
- Unknown

If the world makes sense to you, you haven't been paying attention.
- Anonymous


The lowest depth to which people can sink before god is defined by the word "journalist"
- Kierkegaard

And even if an act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. No act of violence is ever resolved. When the ones who can forgive no longer speak, there is only silence.
- Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces"

"An apology for the Devil- it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books."
- Samuel Butler

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
- Bertrand Russell

Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God." This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
- Thomas Sowell

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
- W. Somerset Maugham

"I have two very rare photographs: one is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car; the other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child."
- Steven Wright

...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
- Thomas Sowell

The Perfect Breakfast: Your son's on the front of your Wheaties box. Your mistress is in the center of your Playboy. And your wife is on the back of the milk carton.
- Anonymous

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
- W B Yeats. "The Valley Of The Black Pig:"

In modern war, the longest purse decides oftener than the longest sword.
- David Ramsay

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
- Alfred Adler

Do not seek the truth. Only cease to cherish opinions.
- Zen Saying

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities.
- Henri Frederic Amiel

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.
- Lord Halifax

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
- Eric Hoffer

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
- Eric Hoffer

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting.
- Eric Hoffer

Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off.
- Stewart H. Holbrook

Formal religion was organized for slaves; it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.
- Elbert Hubbard

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H.L. Mencken

Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

...any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system
- Thomas Paine

Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.
- Mark Twain

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
- Lin Yutang

A cult is a religion with no political power.
- Tom Wolfe

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows
- Robert Frost

The final conclusion is that we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
- Bertrand Russell

The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
- Albert Jay Nock

"At the heart of judging other people is a feeling of being unworthy."
- Gary Kukav

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith, it is an element of faith
- Paul Tillich

All the others. They'd filled my time, filled my life, kept me from ... whatever it is friends keep you from. Maybe just to keep you from thinking about the meaing of the words you say.
- William Barton, "When We Were Real"

The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?...
- Marianne Moore "In Distrust of Merits"

There never was a war that was
not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war....
- Marianne Moore "In Distrust of Merits"

When scientific doctrines are mixed up with religious tenets, the same lifeless dogmatism will commonly benumb them both.
- Theodore Gomperz

Attention Earth: The Universe has been reset by peer . . If there is no lag, you should be reborn soon.

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
- Einstein

You are this world's organ of consciousness, awakening. You are eternity's love for time embodied in human form. Your being and God' being are one.
- Ken Carey

... when in deepest relaxation, you allow these solar winds to blow through the words you have stored in human mind, you realize that these insights, obvious to you in your natural state, are not acknowledged by the human world in which you live through children and poets at times sense them still.
- Ken Carey

"To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States."
- President Bush Sr. to Yale's graduates.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of, not even in the ruins of Nagasaki.
- Jacob Bronowski

"What is keeping us out of recession is the consumer. There is a risk of a sudden attack of prudence. If people stop living beyond their means, this could turn into a recession."
- David Wyss, economist.

The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
- Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure"

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.
- Dickinson

"The danger of ignorance is only in believing your not ignorant"
- Dr. Anderson

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in love is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade though who's steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
- Anna Loise Strong

The eagerness of the religious to believe in evil and their lust to crush it comes largely from their desire to do something tangible for the intangible reward they spend their lives awaiting.The eagerness of the religious to believe in evil and their lust to crush it comes largely from their desire to do something tangible for the intangible reward they spend their lives awaiting.
- Poppy Z Brite

We must take out existence as broadly as we possibly can; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. This, underneath it all, is the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.
- Ranier Maria Rilke

People don't behave the way they should; they behave the way they do
- JimBeauben and Karen Caesar

You can only predict things after they have happened.
- Eugene Ionesco

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
- William A Orton

What unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience, and not necessarily the actual experiences themselves.
- Anais Nin

We are standing in the storm of our own being.
- Michael Ventura

There is apparently nothing that cannot happen.
- Mark Twain (attributed)

There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?
- Woody Allen

It seems to me that every work of art is a fantasy, every book or play, painting or piece of music, everything that is made, by craft or talent, out of somebody's imagination. We have all dreamed, and recorded our dreams as best we could.
- Susan Cooper

the well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
- Oscar Wilde

If i'm playing a video game thats D&D like i want nothing but killing damn it
- Keith`

We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have, and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.
- Charles Swindoll

If you can keep your head about you when all around you are losing theirs, perhaps you have misunderstood the situation.
- Anonymous

So I asked the raven as he passed by,
I said, "Tell me, raven, why'd you make the sky?"
"The moon and stars, I threw them high,
I needed someplace to be flying."
- Kiya Heartwood, from "Wyoming Wind"

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (mid-1800s)

Don't undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special. Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.
- Nancy Sims

Only you know what is best for you. Don't take for granted the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as you would your life, for without them life is meaningless.
- Nancy Sims

Don't let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live all the days of your life.
- Nancy Sims

Don't give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
- Nancy Sims

Don't be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect. It is this fragile thread that binds us to each other.
- Nancy Sims

It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave. Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find.
- Nancy Sims

The quickest way to receive love is to give love. The fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings. Don't dismiss your dreams.
- Nancy Sims


Don't run through life so fast that you forget not only where you've been, but also where you're going. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.
- Nancy Sims

"After a while, hiding important things like the way you feel becomes such an ingrained habit of survival that it turns into second nature. ... and as a result, you wind up hiding emotions not only from other people but from yourself too."
- Michael Cart, "My Father's Scar: A Novel"

"Some barbarian heroes are born, some are made, and some have barbarian heroism thrust upon them (up and under the rib cage)."
- from GURPS Discworld

And if you bury me, add three feet to it
One for your sorrow, two for your sweat
And three for the strange things we never forget

And long after we're both gone
The light will stay on
The light will stay on
- Chris Eckman

I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.
- Thomas Love Peacock

"What I do know is that we all have our hidden currents, no matter how wide and friendly the river seems. Start casting deep enough and who knows what you'll dregde up."
- Charles de Lint, "Someplace to be Flying"

"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what is known as infinity."
- Jean Cocteau

"What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?"
- Irv Kupcinet

"I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world."
- Georges Duhamel

All armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
- Sir Julian Huxley

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
- Jules Renard

"If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?"
- Art Hoppe

The gods too are fond of a joke.
- Aristotle

"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
- Dorthy Parker

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
- Paul Valery

"Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!"
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
- Tom Robbins

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
- Emily Dickinson

The private enterprise system indicates that some people have higher incomes than others.
- Gerry Brown

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
- Lee Iacocca

Please provide the date of your death.
- from an IRS letter

"I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes."
- Richard Nixon, former US President

"I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version."
- Colonel Oliver North, from his Iran-Contra testimony

"We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally."
- Nguyen Co Thatch, Vietnamese foreign minister

"Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything."
- Ivana Trump, upon finishing her first novel

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
- Dan Quayle

The road of good intentions is paved with Hell.
- Spencer Ante

"If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
- Brooke Shields

"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
- Dan Quayle

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.
- Samual Goldwyn

Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.
- Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina

We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a detective in the police farce.
- Correction Notice in the Ely Standard, a British newspaper

A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
- Max Stirner

Antidotes are what you take to prevent dotes.
- Anonymous

Eiffel Tower: The Empire State Building after taxes.
- Anonymous.

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete the monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell: 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
- Shaw

God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
- Steven Hawkins

"A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums."
- Hunter S. Thompson

"In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be Light.' And there was still nothing. But, you could see it."
- Dave Weinstein

Here lies Jan Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble Cutter. This monument was erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monuments of this same style are two hundred and fifty dollars.
- Gravestone Inscription

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
- Anonymous

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?"
- Anonymous

The worst thing about censorship is [deleted by censorship bereau].
- Anonymous

Given a conflict, Murphy's law supercedes Newton's.
- Anonymous

Procrastination means never having to say you're sorry.
- Anonymous

Never hit a man with glasses; hit him with your fist.
- Anonymous

Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce.
- Anonymous

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, let the machine get it.
- Anonymous

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it.
- Anonymous

Some drink at the fountain of knowledge...others just gargle.
- Anonymous

"Some women get excited about nothing and then marry him.
- Anonymous

High explosives are applicable where truth and logic fail.
- Anonymous

You're never too old to learn something stupid.
- Anonymous

Know thyself. If you need help, call the CIA.
- Anonymous

God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them!
- Anonymous

Life is cheap. It's the accessories that kill you.
- Anonymous

As easy as 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841.
- Anonymous

On the other hand, you have different fingers.
- Anonymous

Practice makes perfeckt.
- Anonymous

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
- Fletcher Knebel

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Heck was created for those who refuse to believe in Gosh.
- Anonymous

The trouble with getting a life is making the payments.
- Anonymous

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
- Sam Stevenson

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Religion is a defense against the experience of God.
- Carl Jung

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

If God dropped acid, would he see people?
- Steven Wright

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money
- Alexis de Toucqueville

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
- Samuel Butler

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
- Anonymous

Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
- Unknown

"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
- Charles Lamb

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
- Sean O'Casey

Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth; beauty is almost no longer possible, if it is not a lie...
- R.D. Laing

Dar knew that if he looked out the west window wall, he could make out Bundy Drive in Brentwood ... where Nicole Simpon and Ronald Goldman had been murdered years before by someone cleverly disguised in the DNA of O.J. Simpson.
- Dan Simmons, "Darwin's Blade"

Men in general judge more from appearance than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of perception.
- Machiavelli, "The Prince"


Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx

The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals, It's just that they need more supervision.
- from godlovesfags.org

It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.
- from the Principia Discordia

Death is evil; the gods have so judged;
had it been good, they would die.
- Sappho

"The character of a church, a business or a government can be seen in its attitude toward its detractors.
- Hugh Prather

He's a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom.
- Benjamin Franklin

And since in this life greater rewards are often granted to vices than to virtues, few would prefer what is right to what is useful, if they either feared God nor anticipated an afterlife.
- Descartes

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience
- James Russell Lovell

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
- Yasutani Roshi

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
- MeisterEckhart

Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko: I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If he was a carpenter, I wondered what he charged for bookshelves..
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Napoleon: I heard you speaking to someone.
Sonja: Oh, I was praying.
Napoleon: But I heard TWO voices.
Sonja: Well, I do both parts.
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Boris: And so I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Actually, make that "I run through the valley of the shadow of death-- in order to get OUT of the valley of the shadow of death more quickly, you see.
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Drill Sergeant: One, two, one, two, one, two.
Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko: Three is next, if you're having any trouble.
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Boris: I have no fear of the gallows. Father: No? Boris: No. Why should I? They're going to shoot me. .
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Countess Alexandrovna: You are the greatest lover I've ever had.
Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko: Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone.
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Soldier: He was from my village. He was the village idiot.
Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko: Yeah, what did you do, place?
- from the movie "Love and Death"

Natasha: I never want to marry, I just want to get divorced..
- from the movie "Love and Death"

As if religion was intended, For nothing else but to be mended.
- Samuel Butler

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
- Baruch Spinoza

Morality, thou deadly bane,
Thy tens o' thousands thou has slain!
- Robert Burns

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.
- Eric Hoffer

Nothing is so sad as contempt prior to investigation
- Herbert Spencer

If atheism is a lack of belief in God, than baldness is a lack of belief in hair.
- Jean Paul Satre

Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."
- Thomas 1:7

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
- Thomas 1:18

His disciples said to him, "is circumcision useful or not?" He said to them, "If it were useful, their father would produce children already circumcised from their mother. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become profitable in every respect."
- Thomas 1:53

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
- Albert Einstein

One day Chao-Chou fell down i the snow, and called out, "Help me up! help me up!" A monk came and lay down in the snow beside him. Chao-Chou got up and went away.
- Zen Koan

One can never consent to creep when one feels impulsed to soar.
- Helen Keller

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
- Dostoyevsky

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
- Octavio Perez

When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators.
- Unknown

Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
- Henri Poincare

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
- Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to Col. Edward Carrington", January 16, 1787

The Earth is a witch and the men still burn her.
- Charlie Murphy

All military forces teach their cannon fodder that wearing a uniform is the path to instant sex. How else do you think they get people to do it ?
- Usenet sig.

Our gayness is not something, like skin colour, or sex, or infirmity, immediately apparent to both us and others. We have to discover our homosexuality, and having discovered it, we have a wide range of options, hardly available to others who are stigmatised, as to how far we should reveal our stigma.
- Dennis Altman, "Homosexual Oppression and Liberation"

After all, to come out means defying the most basic and deep-seated norms of a society that sees itself based exclusively on the heterosexual family structure. The wonder of it is not how many homosexuals are neurotic but how many manage to develop health and productive lives in the face of their repudiation of social norms.
- Dennis Altman, "Homosexual Oppression and Liberation"

"Sometimes one man with courage is a majority.
- Andrew Jackson

"Not all the victims were Jewish, but all Jews were victims, and all the killers were Christian."
- Eli Wiesel, on the WW2 Holocaust

Sacrilege (n.): Anything damaging to things sacred, especially the truth
- Unknown

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
- Victor Hugo, Ninetythree, 1874

God means us to be free. With divine daring, He gave us the power of choice.
- Cecil B. DeMille

Tread softly, for this is holy ground. It may be, could we look with knowing eyes, this spot we stand on is Paradise.
- Christina Rossetti

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who would be friends with God must remain alone or make the whole world his friend.
- Mahatma Ghandi

There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.
- William Edward Hartpole Lecky

He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
- Salvador de Madariaga

To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
- Ghose Aurobindo

Maybe Jesus was right when he said the meek shall inherit the earth - but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.
- Robert A. Heinlein

"NEW YORK, NY. A man was knocked down by a car and got up uninjured, but lay back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to feign injury in order to collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death."
- Associated Press, 1977

It's only since we've had Steve with us that I've begun to realise how much of himself a man has to give before he's really possessed.
- Sinclair Ross, "As For Me And My House"

Having little care that Life is brief,
And less that art is long.
Success is in the silences,
Though fame is in the song.
- Bliss Carman, "Envio" (1929) These lines appear on his tombstone

All their paintings look pretty much alike, the net result being more like a gargle or a gob of porridge than a work of art . . . the Hot Mush of madness.
- H F Gadsbey, art critic who coined the tern the hot mush madness in an early attack on the Group of Seven (Dec. 12, 1913)

No greater curse can befall a man that to be afflicted with artistic leanings in Canada.
- Frederick Phillip Grove, novelist (1957)

"I am a chief, but my power to make war is gone, and the only weapon left to me is speech. It is only with tongue and speech that I can fight my people's war."
- Chief Dan George, in "My Heart Soars" (1974)

"I think all of us feel a sense of guilt, not so much to the Indian as toward the fact that we haven't really addressed our minds to this problem."
- Pierre Elliot Trudeau, January 13, 1969

"If homosexuality is a disease, let's call in queer to work. "Hello, can't work today, still queer".
- Stephanie Strong

"That homosexuality has been a natural condition of kings, composers, engineers, poets, housewives and bus drivers, and that it has contributed more than its share of beauty and laughter to an ugly and ungrateful world should be obvious to anyone who is willing to peer beneath the surface."
- Martin Greif

There is a catch-22 of sexual shame: you don't think of yourself as repressed until you've made a break with repression. We forget that even very standard sexualities -- in this case, matrimonial heterosexuality -- require not just free will but the public acceptance of sexual knowledge . . .
- Michael Warner, "The Trouble With Normal"

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
- E M Forster.

"I do not mean to say that they are without the reasoning faculty, but they certainly appear excessively stupid. I understand that their numbers decline each year, -- if they were wholly extinct, I do not think the human nation would be a great sufferer by it."
- Hugh Gray, traveller, commenting on the Indian population in "Letters from Canada" (1809).

One hardly knows whether to take an Indian as a problem, a nuisance, or a possibility. He may be considered from a picturesque, philanthropic, or pestiferous standpoint, according to your tastes or opportunities. You may idealise him, or you may realise him.
- Emily Gowan Murphy, early feminist writer (1910)

"I must rouse myself to occupation; and if I cannot find it without, I must create it within."
- Anna Brownell Jameson

It is much worse to be a mediocre artist than a mediocre post office clerk
- Rudolf Bing

FOR SALE: Eight hundred acres highly improved stock farm, located on Pelletier Creek. Would sell on cash instalment basis. If interested, write Fred Hearsay, Duncairn Sask. N.B. I might be tempted to trade the farm for something really useful, say some white mice or goldfish, or even a playful little mouse. F.H.
- Fred Heasay, Sask. farmer, is said to have placed this classified advertisement in a newspaper during the great depression.

Marriage sanctifies some couples at the expense of others. It's selective legitimacy. . . . Without this corollary effect, marriage would not be able to endow anybody's life with significance. The ennobling and the demeaning go together. Marriage does one only by virtue of the other. Marriage, in short, discriminates.
- Michael Warner, "The Trouble With Normal"

It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is inconsistancy....It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So."
- Clive Barker, "Sacrament"

"We are ready for an unforseen event that may or may not occur."
-Dan Quayle

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
- Albert Jay Nock

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
- Winston Churchill

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
- Thomas Sowell

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
- Robert Lynd

In modern war, the longest purse decides oftener than the longest sword.
- David Ramsay

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting.
- Eric Hoffer

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
- Lin Yutang

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
- Baruch Spinoza

Morality, thou deadly bane,
Thy tens o' thousands thou has slain!
- Robert Burns

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.
- Eric Hoffer

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
- Nathaniel Branden

The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
- Albert Jay Nock

All armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
- Tom Robbins

A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
- Max Stirner

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
- Samuel Butler

Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
- Salvador de Madariaga

Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
- Henri Poincare

He's a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom.
- Benjamin Franklin

Old heroes never die, they reappear in sequels.
- M. Moorcock

"Our first task in approaching another people, culture, or religion is to take off our shoes as if the place we are approaching is holy ground, else we may find ourselves treading on dreams."
- Max Warren

NOW EVERYONE WANTS IN ON THE ACT: "Indian Plane Reported Hijacked by Authorities"
- Reuters headline

If you wish ill on someone, you must sit on their steps and starve to death.
- Irish Proverb

What happens but once, might not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
- Nietzsche

"There has never been a settled, definitive version of the Bible. Only fundamentalists think it came in a fax from heaven."
- Dr. Martyn Percy,Sheffield University, England.

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
- Johann von Goethe

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The "sacred books" are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce."
- Al-Ma'arri, poet, 973-1057

We laugh, but inept is our laughter;
We should weep and weep sore,
Who are shattered like glass, and thereafter
Remolded no more.
- Al-Ma'arri

We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.
- Al-Ma'arri

Mohammed or Messiah! Hear thou me,
The truth entire nor here nor there can be;
How should our God who made the sun and the moon
Give all his light to One, I cannot see.
- Al-Ma'arri

"It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future."
- time travel explained by Rimmer (Red Dwarf)

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."
- President George W. Bush, Philadelphia, May 14, 2001

"My one regret in life is that I'm not someone else."
- Woody Allen

Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.
- Delirium of the Endless

Woe unto you, when all men speak well of you!
- Luke 6:26

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
- Jeremy S. Anderson

Do not waste your fear on the mighty. Cowards make the deadliest opponents . . . and the worst thing about terrorists is how weak they are; so weak they have to be monsterous to accomplish anything"
- Lady Sally, Lady Slings the Booze

Never turn your back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
- W. Churchill

Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial!
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
- William Pitt the Younger, British Prime Minister

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
- Robert A. Heinlein

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghostes and shadowes
I summon'd am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end.
Methinks it is no journey.
- "Tom O'Bedlam's Song", Anon

You can have peace or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Sometimes it's better to light a flame-thrower than curse the darkness.
- Terry Pratchett

The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt against the reality!
- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue--and thoroughly immoral--doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
- Barbara Grizutti Harrison

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.
- Thornton Wilder

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.
- Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, Bastogne, 1944

Exceptional stupidity requires foresight, planning, and careful preparation to be properly effective.
- Alan Dean Foster

The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
- Thomas Paine

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.
- Isabelle Eberhardt

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
- May Sarton

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not a sum of what we have been but what we yearn to be.
- Jose Ortega y Gassett

Give a little drow a dagger and suddenly everything needs killing.
- Unknown

We create our fate every day we live.
- Henry Miller

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
- Catherine Aird

The time is always right to do what is right.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Welcome to the 21st century. Dang, everybody's still stupid.
- Simtra Kyphrion Firefox

Hollowpoints - When you care enough to send the very best.
- Unknown

Jesus saves... and takes half damage!
- Unknown

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.
- Ann Landers

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
- Jack Handey

To bring the dead to life is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.
- Robert Graves

Be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of someone else.
- Judy Garland

I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do something I can do.
- Helen Keller

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, 'Id rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.'
- Tallulah Bankhead

When in doubt, use more thermite.
- Unknown

I've distilled everything to one simple principle - win or die.
- Glenn Close, Dangerous Liaisons

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it's a matter of choice; it's not a thing to be waited for, it's a thing to be achieved.
- William Jennings Bryan

. . . society places more value on stupidity and conformity than it does on intelligence and individualism. . . Element after element in our society is conspiring to slow development and to retard evolution. I refuse to be a part of that. If I have to go on evolving while the rest of humanity stagnates, so be it. I'd rather have ten intelligent neighbors than ten million moronic ones.
- Rev. Gwynarion Starseeker

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Saint-Exupery

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
- Gen. George S. Patton

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.
- Jean Houston

Never retract, never explain, never apologize -- get the thing done and let them howl!
- Nellie McClung

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche

If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.
- George Clooney

In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority.
- Machiavelli

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

Presume not that I am the thing I was.
- W. Shakespeare, Henry VI pt II

For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It's better that they are made by others but failing that, you'll have to make them yourself.
- Rita Mae Brown

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
- Rabindranath Tagore

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.
- Albert Einstein

Is it true that we live on Earth?
Not forever on Earth; we are only a little while here.
Even jade will be broken,
Even gold shall be crushed,
Even quetzal feathers will be torn apart.
Not forever on Earth; we are only a little while here.
- King Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco (1402-1472)

Do not be afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
- William James

Man is what he believes.
- Anton Chekhov

Democracy: Three wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.
- Unknown

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
- Kenneth Clark

Only those who dare, truly live.
- Ruth Freedman

Life is not worth living without knowing what to fight for... I know what to fight for, and in that strength I will never lose
- Unknown

But it is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope; and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.
- Robert Kennedy

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition aspired, and success achieved.
- Helen Keller

Don't dream it - BE it!
- Dr. Frank N. Furter

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing left to us in a bad time.
- E.B.White

The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom is Courage.
- Thucydides

Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.
- Theodore N. Vail

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
- Helen Keller

There is just one life for each of us: our own.
- Euripides

When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights, and lock the universe behind me as I leave.
- Death, of the Endless

Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.
- James Allen

There seemed to be endless obstacles . . . it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.
- Joanna Field

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: Not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
- Colin Wilson

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
- Mark Twain

The one way of tolerating exis- tence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
- Gustave Flaubert

"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."
- Virginia Woolf

"Yes; no doubt the value of men lay only in what they had transformed."
- Malraux.

Madness need not be breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
- R D Laing

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
- Nathaniel Lee (1653-1692), objecting to being confined in Bedlam

The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night.
- Otto von Bismarck

Politics is the art of the possible.
- Otto von Bismarck

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
cribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
- W. H. Auden (1907-1973) "Twelve Songs, No. 9" (1936)

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. Knowledge is power.
- Francis Bacon

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.
- Douglas Bader

Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks.
- motto of the Order of the Garter

Questioner: Mr. Haldane, what can you tell about the Creator from your study of biology?
The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.
- J. B. S. Haldane

He who complies against his will
Is of the same opinion still.
- Samuel Butler

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
- James Branch Cabell

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
- G. K. Chesterton

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. Specialization is for insects.
- R.A Heinlein

The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
- Thomas Hobbes

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
- Terry Pratchett

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses, and you don't have to do what the squire tells you", they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say "yes".
- Terry Pratchett

Among the many things that he requested of me tonight, this is the principal, -- that on his gravestone shall be this inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
- Richard Moncton Milnes in a letter wrote of John Keats

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes.
- Juvenal (loosely translated: "Who watches the watchmen?" literally:"Who will guard the guardians themselves?")

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth
- Rudyard Kipling "The Ballad of East and West"

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.
- Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad"

She wasted time wishing for things instead of working out how to make them happen.
- Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad"

Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle m'erite.
(Every nation has the government it deserves.)
- Maistre, Joseph de

Because it's there.
- Supposedly said by G. H. L. Mallory, explaining why he wanted to climb Mt.Everest

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamer of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
- Ode by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

We has met the enemy, and he is us!
- Walt Kelly, "Pogo"

We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
- Will Rogers

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. -
F D Roosevelt

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5

This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here he lies, where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'
- Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Requiem' from 'Underwoods' (1887).

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.
- Ian Stewart ,"Does God play Dice?"

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
- Dylan Thomas

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
- Mark Twain

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist.
- The Usual Suspects, spoken by Kevin Spacey's character Verbal Klint/Kaiser Souze

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
- attributed to John Archibald Wheeler

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.
- Robert Graves,. from "To Bring The Dead To Life"

"Logic could only take you so far, then you had to get out and hop."
- Terry Pratchett

Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant idiot.
- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

If you ignore the rules, people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so they don't apply to you.
- Terry Pratchett, "Equal Rites"

A vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.
- Terry Pratchett, "Equal Rites"

They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls.
- Sir Edward Coke

What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria"

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane, in "War is Kind"

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
- William Faulkner

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"
- Terry Pratchett, "Mort"

History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it.
- Terry Pratchett, "Mort"

It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.
- Terry Pratchett, "Sourcery"

Just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.
- Terry Pratchett, "Wyrd Sisters"

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods, 1992"

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No One There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, "Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles."
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods, 1992"

Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods, 1992"

When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

"Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong."
- Terry Pratchett, "Soul Music"

What better work for one who loves freedom than the job of Watchman? Law is the servant of Freedom. Freedom without limits is just a word.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

Either all days are holy or none are.
- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spellings of words.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs.
- Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
- Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"

Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
- Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
- Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"

Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

"Remember – that which does not kill us can only make us stronger."
"And that which does kill us leaves us dead!"
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

FOR SALE BY OWNER Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. 45 volumes. Excellent condition. $1,000.00 or best offer. No longer needed. Got married last weekend. Wife knows f#*#ing everything.
- Ad seen in the New York Times:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?
- Terry Pratchett, "The Fifth Elephant"

Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes. ... Sometimes they're the same person.
- Terry Pratchett, "The Truth"

Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyrants. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. ... It's the only way to make progress.
- Terry Pratchett, "The Truth"

Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth.
- Terry Pratchett, "The Truth:"

"It's not my job to discipline you, it's yours."
- Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"

The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it. So while I was waiting, it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more fun. ... After all, enlightenment begins where perplexity ends.
- Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"

Age and wisdom don't always go together, I've found. ... Some people just become stupid with more authority.
- Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"

Seeing things a human shouldn't have to see makes us human.
- Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.
- Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"

Real education happens when you pick up a fact here, and another fact there, and put them together and get an insight.
- Terry Pratchett

Look, the US is simply bigger, which means there's more of everything, including more morons. And because the morons shout, they tend to drown out the intelligent people, which the USA also has more of. Unless you believe the Hubble telescope was built by the audience of the Ricky Lake show, that is.
- Terry Pratchett

"Educational" refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
- Terry Pratchett

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
- L Frank Baum, "The Wizard of Oz"

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
- William F. Buckley, Jr.

I save about twenty drafts – that's ten meg of disc space – and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of "Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a real job!" and the rest are wiped.
- Terry Pratchett

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.
- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"

He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he'd lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavour, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read "Endeavour to be the one inside" he'd rather lost heart.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

In Ghat they believe in vampire watermelons, although folklore is silent about what they believe about vampire watermelons. Possibly they suck back.
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

"But you read a lot of books, I'm thinking. Hard to have faith, ain't it, when you've read too many books?"
- Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum"

I believe Christ was a genuine avatar of the Great Mother - a Dionysus incarnation, pretty much. His worship has been dreadfully perverted. They have turned him into this dreadful sort of pathetic thing instead of the sacrifical god of Inspiration.
- Sheila Devlin

In fact, I think the big mystery of our society is that men and women are exactly alike and that this truth is being hidden under an incredible load of bullshit.
- Sheila Devlin

There are those that forsake the paths of light to aid those who walk in darkness.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley

"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not be too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."
- J.R.R Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"

And I suppose you know what sound is made by one hand clapping, do you?" said the holy man nastily.
YES. CL. THE OTHER HAND MAKES THE AP.
"Ah-ha, no, you're wrong there," said the holy man, back on firmer ground. He waved a skinny hand. "No sound, see?"
THAT WASN'T A CLAP. THAT WAS JUST A WAVE.
- Terry Pratchett "Soul Music"
"The important thing, she decided, was to stay calm. There was always a logical explanation for everything, even if you had to make it up."
- Susan in Terry Pratchett's "Soul Music"

For of all the sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic.
- Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

Death isn't on line. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?
- Terry Pratchett, "Terry Pratchett

"I'm a barbarian", shouted Cohen. "And the honor I got, see, is mine. I didn't steal it off'f someone else."
- Terry Pratchett, "Interesting Times"

The darkness can teach you things that the light has never seen, and will never be able to see . . .
- Marion Zimmer Bradley

"One who does good, having an infinite power to do evil, should have credit not only for the good she does but for the evil from which she refrains."
- Unknown

A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night and then as its mausoleum.
- Kingsley Amis, on recovering from a hangover, "Lucky Jim"

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted the truth. Perhaps you were expecting jelly and ice cream?
- Terry Pratchett," Carpe Jugulum"

I've always thought that one of the major problems of being a king is the risk of your daughter getting a prick.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless, and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape -- we never burned and tortured and ripped each other apart and called it morality.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

The trouble with you, Ibid, is that you think you're the biggest bloody authority on everything.
- Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids"

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.
- Edmond Jules oncourt

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books arewhere things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
- Julian Barnes

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
- P. J. O'Rourke

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep on growing until I die. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.
- Pete Hamill

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
- Muriel Rukeyser

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
- Kim Hubbard

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
- Oxford Union Society Rules

I've got a talent to act. No matter what any newspaper says about me, I am one of the most sensitive human beings on earth, and I know it.
- Jean-Claude van Damme

Willow: There's gotta be a flaw.
Buffy: I think the part where he's pure evil and kills randomly was an oversight.
- "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

It isn't evil that's running the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.
- Ned Rorem

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
- James Earl Jones

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
- Rebecca West

This is the first age that's paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
- Arthur C. Clarke

If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
- Albert Einstein

Bush Sr. was a jerk, Quayle an idiot, Clinton was atrocious and disgusting, most of those who persecuted him were hypocritical, Gore is shallow and weak, Bradley is an idealist, Bush Jr. a fool, and all of the independent candidates act like they're on drugs.
- David Borenstein, on the 2000 presidential election

I knew you were expecting me...on my way here I passed a cinema with the the sign, 'The Mummy Returns'."
- Margaret Thatcher, addressing a political rally of the Conservative Party faithful, 2001.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
- Erma Bombeck

The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don't give a damn.
- Agatha Christie

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself insituations where he is most likely to be creamed?
- Solomon Short

History is a vast early warning system.
- Norman Cousins

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.
- Robert A. Heinlein

People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.
- Terry Pratchett

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
~ Terry Pratchett

History often resembles 'Myth', because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
~ J.R.R.Tolkien

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.
- Jean-Claude Van Damme

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
- Samuel Butler

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around -- and why his parents will always wave back.
- William D. Tammeus

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
- Douglas Adams

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
- Dave Barry

So, too, the creeds of man: the one prevails
Until the other comes; and this one fails
When that one triumphs; ay, the lonesome world
Will always want the latest fairytales.
- Al-Ma'arri

"There is more truth in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in all the creeds."
- Tennyson

Yet is man's death a long, long sleep of lead
And all his life a waking. O'er our dead
The prayers are chanted, hopeless farewells taken;
And there we lie, never to stir again.
Shall I so fear in mother earth to rest?
How soft a cradle is thy mother's breast!
- Al-Ma'arri

When once the viewless spirit from me is gone,
By rains unfreshed let my bones rot on!
- Al-Ma'arri

By fearing whom I trust I find my way
To truth; by trusting wholly I betray
The trust of wisdom; better far is doubt
Which brings the false into the light of day.
- Al-Ma'arri

The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
- Sean O'Casey

Science is the pursuit of truth without lawyers
- Unknown

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
- George Santayana

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
- Marshall Mcluhan

Some people used to claim that, if enough monkeys sat in front of enough typewriters and typed long enough, eventually one of them would reproduce the collected works of Shakespeare. The internet has proven this not to be the case.
- David L. Johnson

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
- L. Long

Happily, I'm not big on games. Getting the computer to work good is a game in itself.

- Unknown
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
- Galileo Galilei

Evidence without Conclusion is Science, Conclusion without Evidence is Religion
- anon

Help others, failing in that do no harm.
- Dalai Lama

And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

It's trampling infidels. You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

Koomi's theory was largely based on the good old Gnostic heresy, which tends to turn up all over the multiverse whenever men get up off their knees and start thinking for two minutes together, although the shock of the sudden altitude tends to mean the thinking is a little whacked.
- Terry Prartchett, "Small Gods"

It's a funny thing, but why is it that the heathens and the barbarians seem to have the best places to go when they die?
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

"You're not one of us."
"I don't think I'm one of them, either," said Brutha. "I'm one of mine."
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary.
- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"

"The truth may be out there, but the lies are in your head."
- Terry Pratchett

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time."
- Terry Pratchett

"The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one."
- Brooks Atkinson

"We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

"The visionary is the only true realist."
- Federico Fellini

Fantasy and reality are equally personal and equally felt, so that their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.
- Luis Bunuel

If you never fall, you dance in constant fear of falling.
- Suzanne Farrell

People with glasses are lucky. They have stars on rainy nights.
- Spider Robinson

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
- GK Chesterton

After toppling an altruistic democracy, seizing control of the military, and establishing yourself as supreme dictator, it's a good idea to invest in helmets that your troops can see through.
- Lessons from Star Wars, unknown.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him.
- CG Jung

I believe that sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.
- Garrison Keillor

The English language is the result of Norman soldiers trying to set up dates with Saxon barmaids . . .
- Unknown

On going to war over religion: "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend."
- Rich Jeni

Any idiot can use a gun; it takes a special kind of idiot to use a sword.
- Joseph Kormann

"Life's a lot more fun if you interpret everything as a portent of evil."
- Mike Benedetto

"We still are watching Mankind fall . . ."
- Professor Mark C. Amodio

"They weren't just wandering around in the dark banging their swords on people's heads . . . !"
- Professor Mark C. Amodio, on ther middle ages.

"Boy meets girl. Boy and girl sorta hit it off. Then--nuclear apocalypse!!! Warheads warheads warheads!!!!"
- Sci Fi Romance explained (unknown)

If you grow up too much you lose what makes you human.
- Leah Smith

Sanity is blasphemy against the soul.
- Kieran Boyle

"If God had wanted us to use the metric system, Jesus would have had 10 apostles."
- Unknown

Personal isn't the same as important. People just think it is.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

Humans are always slightly lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.
- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars
- John Burroughs

The riddle of God is this. God is what you believe It is. No man is wrong about the existence of God, and yet no man is right about his knowledge of God. There is no mystery in God except that It is what each Soul believes that It is. - Paul Twitchell, "Stranger by the River"

"It's not the fur or the fangs that make you a monster, not always. Sometimes, it's just where you draw the line."
- spoken by Dolph, in "Blue Moon" by Laurell K Hamilton

One day your prince will come, mine just took a wrong turn, got lost, and is to stubborn to ask for directions
- Unknown

If World War Three actually happens, I want to be the one to say, as the mushroom cloud erupts, "Well, that about wraps it up for this lifetime!" If you've got say something that's a great deal better than saying 'Aaaaarrggghh!'
- Terry Pratchett

"A journalist has a rapist's mentality. Get in there, get what you want, get out again quick. An interview needn't last more than fifteen minutes. A good quote for the middle, a good quote for the end, and the rest you make up back at the office."
- Terry Pratchett

Trying to make plans is like trying to throw a brick through a window and the window is not there."
- Jordan MacLeod

The Law of Fives simply states that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR AR SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO FIVE. The Law of Fives is never wrong.
- from the Principia Discordia

... the mind cannot believe the existence of a God. It is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief; they only are reprehensible who willingly neglect to remove the false medium thro' which their mind views the subject.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism"

Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. -- Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism"

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