My Favorite Quotations: A List of Them.
While you, my faithful readers, await some actual content please feel free to enjoy this list of my favorite quotations. Some from the famous, the infamous, the intellectual, some from ancient history, some from my favorite films. The only real commonalities between them are that in one way or another they have meant something to me.
Enjoy!
"I am in the prime of my senility." - Brother Theodore
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"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean THEY aren't paranoid, too." - Faculty X slogan, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (Grant Morrison & Frank Quietly)
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"One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real." - Klaus Kinski, Actor
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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." - Napoleon Bonaparte
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"To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?" - William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Scene I)
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"I can resist anything, except temptation." - Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
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“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." - Plutarch
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"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars." - Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
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"I got to be Jim Morrison longer than Jim Morrison did." - Warren Zevon
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"The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care." - Hugh Macleod, Politician
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"There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense." - Elizabeth Bennet, Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austin)
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"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." - WB Yeats
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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." - Dr. Samuel Johnson
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"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
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"I used to want to be an astronaut, but astronauts don't even go to the moon anymore." - Det. Ray Velcoro, True Detective Season 2
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"Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole." - William S. Burroughs, Author
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“Lesson number one: trust no one. The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them.” – Col. Hunter Gathers, The Venture Brothers.
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"A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness." - Gul Dukat, Star Trek: DS9 (Ep: Sacrifice of Angels)
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"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets." - Rudyard Kipling
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“I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: 'There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart'.” - James Pratt, The Woman in the Portrait
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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black sea's of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
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"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." - Hunter S. Thompson
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"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the sort of person I preach to." - J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, Book of The Subgenius
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"Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood." - Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
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"Always carry a knife with you, just in case there is cheesecake, or you need to stab someone in the throat." - Marine General James Mattis
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"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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"Eddie, there's no such thing as a psychic. People believe my folderol because I wear a black tuxedo. ... we're in show biz. It's all about razzle-dazzle. Appearances. If you look good and you talk well, people will believe anything." - The Amazing Criswell, Ed Wood
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"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream." - Ted Bundy
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"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?" - Lewis Carroll, The Walrus & The Carpenter
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"My father used to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I laid the first stone right there. I'd committed myself. I'd pay any price; go to any lengths because my cause was righteous. My... intentions were good. In the beginning, that seemed like enough." - Capt. Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Ep: In the Pale Moonlight)
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"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
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"Ordinary people avoid troubles. Extraordinary people turn them into advantage." - Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson
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"There are two rules for success in life. Rule one: Never reveal everything you know." - Edward Nygma aka The Riddler, Batman: Detective Comics
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"We have to declare holy war against what we see on television every single day." - Werner Herzog, Filmmaker
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"Find what you love, and let it kill you." - Charles Bukowski, Author
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"Pac-Man's character is difficult to explain even to the Japanese -- he is an innocent character. He hasn't been educated to discern between good and evil. He acts more like a small child than a grown-up person. Think of him as a child learning in the course of his daily activities. If some one tells him guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns. But he would most probably eat any gun, even the pistols of policemen who need them." - Toru Iwatani, Creator of Pac-Man
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"...all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin - flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence." - Maurice Chatelain, Former Chief of NASA Communications Systems
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"This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real." - Philip Gourevitch
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"You will die like a dog for no good reason." - Ernest Hemingway
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"There is nothing outside of yourself that can enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself." - Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
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"Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice." - Madeleine, Vertigo
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"I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well." - Alexander the Great
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"What! Because we are poor shall we be vicious?" - John Webster
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"The slow-rising central horror of 'Watergate' is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it." - Hunter S. Thompson
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"There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man." - Polybius
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"If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done." - Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
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"Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain." - Albert Einstein
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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist that black flag, and start slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken
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"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." - Prof. Brian O'Blivion, Videodrome
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"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests." - H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
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"Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor earth two masters." - Alexander the Great
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"When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money." - Cree Proverb
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"Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." - Jean Paul-Sartre
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“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
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“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.” - Carlos Ruis Zafon
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"What fresh hell is this?!" - Dorothy Parker
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"I'm 87 years old...I only eat so I can smoke and stay alive.. The only fear I have is how long consciousness is gonna hang on after my body goes. I just hope there's nothing. Like there was before I was born. I'm not really into religion, they're all macrocosms of the ego. When man began to think he was a separate person with a separate soul, it created a violent situation.
The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.
Anybody else you've interviewed bring these things up? Hang on, I gotta take this call..... Hey, brother. That's great, man. Yeah, I'm being interviewed... We're talking about nothing. I've got him well-steeped in nothing right now. He's stopped asking questions." - Harry Dean Stanton, Actor & Musician
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"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." - Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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"I believe that these ET (extra-terrestrial) vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury & Gemini Astronaut
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"My attorney has never been able to accept the notion, often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation, that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter." - Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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"James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death." - Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
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"I must not fear, fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain." - Frank Herbert, Dune (Paul Atreides reciting the 'Litany Against Fear')
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"The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." - Steve Furtick
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"For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public.
Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury & Gemini Astronaut
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"All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said 'Welcome aboard'." - Fantastic, Fallout: New Vegas
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“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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"Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying." - Michael O'Hara, Lady from Shanghai
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"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures that made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." - Randall Monroe
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"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson, Neuromancer
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"Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies." - Alexander the Great
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"Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception." - Carl Sagan
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"When the axe came into the woods, the trees said 'at least the handle is one of us'." - Turkish Proverb
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"If there is a god, he will have to beg my forgiveness." - Found carved into a Jewish concentration camp prisoner barracks
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"Two possibilities exist; either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C Clarke
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"When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre." - Cheeseekau, Shawnee Indian
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"You wanna get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone!" - Jim Malone, The Untouchables
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"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction." - Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of the Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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"The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors." - Plutarch
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"Treat people in your debt like family; exploit them." - Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #111, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
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"We cross our bridges as 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 the presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." - Winston Churchill
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"I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity." - Dr. Amedeus Arkham, Batman: Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison & Dave McKean)
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"War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
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"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." - Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
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"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the less of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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"I remember a time when things were good. I remember steak dinners, and baked potatoes, and martini lunches, and comical drunks, and a cigarette after every course 'to aide digestion'. And the heart attacks, and the alcohol poisoning, and the lung cancer, well those were acceptable losses.
Once it seemed like we could live forever and nobody would mind." - Steve Darnall & Alex Ross , Uncle Sam
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"Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing; moderation is for cowards." - Peter Berg
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"Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love." - Clive Barker, Arabat: Absolute Midnight
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"Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
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"What is illness to the body of our knight errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls he shall rise again. Woe to the wicked! Sancho! My armor! My sword!" - Man of La Mancha (Don Quixote), Dale Wasserman
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"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." - Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God
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"I come in peace, I didn't bring artillery, but I am pleading with you with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all." - Marine General James Mattis, to Iraqi tribal leaders
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"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." - Al Capone
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"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own." - H.G. Wells
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"I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that." - Henry Rollins
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"I only need two things; Your submission and your obedience to my will." - The Master, Doctor Who: The Daemons
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"We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them." - John Waters
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"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues." - Elizabeth Taylor
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"Stood in street. Watched it burn.
Imagined limbless felt torsos inside; breasts blackening; bellies smoldering; busting into flame one by one.
Watched for an hour.
Nobody got out.
Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, Hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion.
There is nothing else.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them, or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs.
It's us.
Only us.
Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world." - Walter Kovacs aka Rorschach, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)
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"The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" - Prof. Steven Hawking, A Brief History of Time
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"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it." - François-Marie Arouet
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"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never persistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man." - Frank Herbert, Dune
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"I like intelligent women. When you go out it shouldn't be a staring contest." - Frank Sinatra
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"Semper Fidelis Tyrannosaurus (Always Faithful, Terrible Lizard)!" - Henchmen #21, The Venture Bros.
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"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.
It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get..." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s
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"I am going to look at the stars, They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us. All we ever see of the stars are their old photographs." - Dr. Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbens)
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"Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own." - Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #47, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
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"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." - President John F. Kennedy
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"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemingway
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"Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
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"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape." - William S. Burroughs
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"The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." - Nikola Tesla
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"The pain, so unexpected and undeserved had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life... My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing." - Bob Arctor, A Scanner Darkly (Philip K Dick)
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"You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President!” – Nellie Connally, wife of then-Texas Governor John B. Connally, believed to be the last words JFK heard before he was shot.
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"Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame." - The War Doctor, Doctor Who: Time of The Doctor
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"I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and queen: moult no feather. I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act II, Scene II)
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"There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need." - Werner Herzog
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"..the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside." - Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Copper Beeches (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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"I was always slightly in contempt of the nice girl next door that your mother is always trying to introduce you to. Its the slut down the street that's really interesting." - Will Eisner, Creator/Writer of 'The Spirit'
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"I know other astronauts share my feelings... and we know the government is sitting on hard evidence of UFOs." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury and Gemini Astronaut
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"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud, playwright and poet.
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"I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots." - Hunter S. Thompson
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“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.” - Charles Manson
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"One is always considered mad, when one discovers something that others cannot grasp." - Ed Wood
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"Writing is easy; all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
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"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" - President Ronald Reagan
. . .
"I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder." - Werner Herzog
. . .
"Let there be no doubt. Alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, laser and fiber optic technologies, particle beams, electromagnetic propulsion systems, depleted uranium projectiles, stealth capabilities, and many others.
How do I know? I was in charge!
I think the kids on this planet are wise to the truth, and I think we ought to give it to them. I think they deserve it." - Colonel Philip Corso, Former Head of Foreign Technology at the U.S. Army's Research and Development Department at the Pentagon. Four years Director of Intelligence on President Eisenhower's White House National Security Staff.
. . .
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences." - H. P. Lovecraft
. . .
"Good evening. Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation and decay so there better be someone somewhere who does know... That's the God bullshit. And then there's the noble man bullshit. That man is a noble creature that can order his own world who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for thirty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see." - Howard Beale, Network.
. . .
"The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young." - Brother Theodore
. . .
"Why do people say 'Grow some balls'? Balls are weak and sensitive! If you really wanna get tough, grow a vagina! Those things take a pounding!" - Betty White
. . .
"Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it." - Clive Barker
. . .
"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." - The Cloths of Heaven, W.B. Yeats
. . .
"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." - Stephen King, The Dark Tower
. . .
"I love talking about the Warren Commission, I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it. I think that's interesting in what is ostensibly a democracy. Sarcasm - come on in. People say "Bill, quit talking about Kennedy man. It was a long time ago, just let it go, alright? It's a long time ago, just forget it." I'm like, alright, then don't bring up Jesus to me. As long as we're talking shelf life here..." - Bill Hicks
. . .
“We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde
. . .
"I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in." - Charles Manson
. . .
“When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.” - African proverb from Isak Dinesen’s 'Out of Africa'
. . .
"I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth." - President Harry S Truman
. . .
"We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors." - Dr. Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbens)
. . .
“A great master does not move his puppet if there is no reason to do so.” - Bunraku instruction manual
. . .
"Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that two men could be wounded seven times by two bullets? Do you believe that 18 witnesses could just magically up and die over the next three years?" - Steve Darnall & Alex Ross, Uncle Sam
. . .
"Only those who went hungry with me and stood by me when I went through a bad time at some point in life will eat at my table." - Pablo Escobar
. . .
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." - Emily Bronte, Wurthering Heights
. . .
"Politics is the entertainment division of the Military/Industrial Complex." - Frank Zappa
. . .
"Those mondo weirdo video guys, they've got unsavory connections, they play rough. Rougher than even Nicki Brand wants to play... You know, in Brazil, Central America, those kinds of places, making underground videos is considered a subversive act. They execute people for it.
In Pittsburgh, who knows?" - Max Renn, Videodrome
. . .
"But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: (1) Everything is part of it. (2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood." - Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
. . .
"I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out." - Bill Hicks
. . .
"I'm a respectable citizen. Multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous." - Hunter S. Thompson
. . .
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” - George Orwell, Animal Farm
. . .
"Every species can smell its own extinction." - John Trent, In The Mouth of Madness
. . .
"My life's been a circle of violence and degradation long as I can remember. I'm ready to tie it off." - Rustin Cohle, True Detective
. . .
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
. . .
"This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may not) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed; of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in the snow blind wastes beneath the Northern Lights; of the two women he loved and of the choice he made between them; of how he broke his most sacred oath; and how finally all the things he had were taken from him save one.
It ends with a wink. It begins in a quiet Midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet Midwestern future. Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky... but no: it's only a bird, only a plane. Superman died ten years ago.
This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?" - Alan Moore, introduction to 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?'
. . .
"You will show my head to the crowd: It is worth seeing." - Georges Danton, just before his execution.
. . .
"Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me." - Al Capone
. . .
"The U.S. Government hasn't maintained secrecy regarding UFOs It's been leaking out all over the place. But the way it's been handled is by denial, by denying the truth of the documents that have leaked. By attempting to show them as fraudulent, as bogus of some sort. There has been a very large disinformation and misinformation effort around this whole area. And one must wonder, how better to hide something out in the open than just to say, 'It isn't there. You're deceiving yourself if you think this is true.' And yet, there it is right in front of you.
So it's a disinformation effort that's concerning here, not the fact that they have kept the secret. They haven't kept it. It's been getting out into the public for fifty years or more." - Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut & 6th human to walk on the moon
. . .
“I’ve gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into me, and neither of us liked what we saw.” - Brother Theodore
. . .
"Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." - Marine General James Mattis
. . .
"How often does a grown man get to pretend to be Bela Lugosi? Not often enough." - Neil Gaiman
. . .
"Whoever controls what you see, controls what you think. That's why it's called 'Programing'." - Richard Metzger
. . .
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
. . .
"And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that goodnight
. . .
"No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people." - President William Howard Taft
. . .
"Alcohol may be mans worst enemy, but doesn't the bible say to 'Love thy Enemy'?" - Frank Sinatra
. . .
"I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up until the day he killed himself." - Johnny Carson
. . .
"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." - Walt Disney
. . .
"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." - Rustin Cohle, True Detective
. . .
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.” - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
. . .
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." - Rudyard Kipling
. . .
"A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens." - Orson Welles
. . .
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
. . .
"Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating." - William S Burroughs
. . .
"Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity." - Frank Zappa
. . .
"It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious." - Bill Hicks
. . .
"Screw the dialogue, lets wreck some cars." - Hal Needham, stuntman-turned-film
. . .
"If you have a gun, you can rob a bank. If you have a bank, you can rob anyone." - Roman Sionis aka Black Mask, Batman: Detective Comics
. . .
"When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car." - Will Rogers
. . .
"Last night, I was awakened from a fitful sleep, shortly after 2 o'clock in the morning by a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice. I couldn't make it out at first in the dark bedroom. And I said, 'I'm sorry, you will have to talk a little louder.'...And the Voice said to me: 'I want you to tell the people the truth, not an easy thing to do because the people don't want to know the truth.' And I said, 'You're kidding. What the hell should I know about the truth?' But the Voice said to me: 'Don't worry about the truth. I will put the words in your mouth.' And I said, 'What is this, the burning bush? For God's sake, I'm not Moses.' And the Voice said to me: 'And I'm not God. What has that got to do with it?'
And the Voice said to me: 'We're not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth. I don't expect you people to be capable of truth, but god-dammit, at least you're capable of self-preservation!' And I said, 'Why me?' And the Voice said: 'Because you're on television, dummy! You have 40 million Americans listening to you and after the show you could have 50 million. For Pete's sake, I'm not asking you to walk the land in sackcloth and ashes preaching the Armageddon. You're on TV, man.' So I thought about it for a moment, and then I said, 'Ok.'" - Howard Beale, Network
. . .
"It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?" - Detective Gaff, Blade Runner
. . .
"Why should I obtain by force that which I can obtain by cheating?" - Doc Holliday
. . .
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
. . .
"I was an equal opportunity merchant of death. I supplied everyone but the Salvation Army. I sold Israeli-model Uzis to Muslims. I sold Communist-made bullets to Fascists... I even shipped cargo to Afghanistan when they were fighting my fellow Soviets. I never sold to Osama bin Laden. Not on any moral grounds: back then, he was always bouncing checks." - Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
. . .
"When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons." - John Webster
. . .
"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." - Arthur Miller
. . .
"Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all." - Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. . .
"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors." - Rudyard Kipling
. . .
"All empires are created of blood and fire." - Pablo Escobar
. . .
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid." - Q, Star Trek: TNG (Ep: Q Who)
. . .
"A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." - Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Confederacy
. . .
"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death." - H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon
. . .
"Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit." - Augustus, first Roman Emperor (his last words)
. . .
Enjoy!
+ + +
"I am in the prime of my senility." - Brother Theodore
. . .
"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean THEY aren't paranoid, too." - Faculty X slogan, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (Grant Morrison & Frank Quietly)
. . .
"One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real." - Klaus Kinski, Actor
. . .
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." - Napoleon Bonaparte
. . .
"To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?" - William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Scene I)
. . .
"I can resist anything, except temptation." - Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
. . .
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." - Plutarch
. . .
"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars." - Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
. . .
"I got to be Jim Morrison longer than Jim Morrison did." - Warren Zevon
. . .
"The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care." - Hugh Macleod, Politician
. . .
"There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense." - Elizabeth Bennet, Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austin)
. . .
"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." - WB Yeats
. . .
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
. . .
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." - Dr. Samuel Johnson
. . .
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
. . .
"I used to want to be an astronaut, but astronauts don't even go to the moon anymore." - Det. Ray Velcoro, True Detective Season 2
. . .
"Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole." - William S. Burroughs, Author
. . .
“Lesson number one: trust no one. The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them.” – Col. Hunter Gathers, The Venture Brothers.
. . .
"A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness." - Gul Dukat, Star Trek: DS9 (Ep: Sacrifice of Angels)
. . .
"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets." - Rudyard Kipling
. . .
“I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: 'There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart'.” - James Pratt, The Woman in the Portrait
. . .
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black sea's of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
. . .
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." - Hunter S. Thompson
. . .
"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the sort of person I preach to." - J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, Book of The Subgenius
. . .
"Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood." - Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
. . .
"Always carry a knife with you, just in case there is cheesecake, or you need to stab someone in the throat." - Marine General James Mattis
. . .
"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
. . .
"Eddie, there's no such thing as a psychic. People believe my folderol because I wear a black tuxedo. ... we're in show biz. It's all about razzle-dazzle. Appearances. If you look good and you talk well, people will believe anything." - The Amazing Criswell, Ed Wood
. . .
"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream." - Ted Bundy
. . .
"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?" - Lewis Carroll, The Walrus & The Carpenter
. . .
"My father used to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I laid the first stone right there. I'd committed myself. I'd pay any price; go to any lengths because my cause was righteous. My... intentions were good. In the beginning, that seemed like enough." - Capt. Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Ep: In the Pale Moonlight)
. . .
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
. . .
"Ordinary people avoid troubles. Extraordinary people turn them into advantage." - Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson
. . .
"There are two rules for success in life. Rule one: Never reveal everything you know." - Edward Nygma aka The Riddler, Batman: Detective Comics
. . .
"We have to declare holy war against what we see on television every single day." - Werner Herzog, Filmmaker
. . .
"Find what you love, and let it kill you." - Charles Bukowski, Author
. . .
"Pac-Man's character is difficult to explain even to the Japanese -- he is an innocent character. He hasn't been educated to discern between good and evil. He acts more like a small child than a grown-up person. Think of him as a child learning in the course of his daily activities. If some one tells him guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns. But he would most probably eat any gun, even the pistols of policemen who need them." - Toru Iwatani, Creator of Pac-Man
. . .
"...all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin - flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence." - Maurice Chatelain, Former Chief of NASA Communications Systems
. . .
"This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real." - Philip Gourevitch
. . .
"You will die like a dog for no good reason." - Ernest Hemingway
. . .
"There is nothing outside of yourself that can enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself." - Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
. . .
"Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice." - Madeleine, Vertigo
. . .
"I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well." - Alexander the Great
. . .
"What! Because we are poor shall we be vicious?" - John Webster
. . .
"The slow-rising central horror of 'Watergate' is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it." - Hunter S. Thompson
. . .
"There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man." - Polybius
. . .
"If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done." - Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
. . .
"Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain." - Albert Einstein
. . .
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist that black flag, and start slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken
. . .
"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." - Prof. Brian O'Blivion, Videodrome
. . .
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests." - H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
. . .
"Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor earth two masters." - Alexander the Great
. . .
"When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money." - Cree Proverb
. . .
"Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." - Jean Paul-Sartre
. . .
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
. . .
“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.” - Carlos Ruis Zafon
. . .
"What fresh hell is this?!" - Dorothy Parker
. . .
"I'm 87 years old...I only eat so I can smoke and stay alive.. The only fear I have is how long consciousness is gonna hang on after my body goes. I just hope there's nothing. Like there was before I was born. I'm not really into religion, they're all macrocosms of the ego. When man began to think he was a separate person with a separate soul, it created a violent situation.
The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.
Anybody else you've interviewed bring these things up? Hang on, I gotta take this call..... Hey, brother. That's great, man. Yeah, I'm being interviewed... We're talking about nothing. I've got him well-steeped in nothing right now. He's stopped asking questions." - Harry Dean Stanton, Actor & Musician
. . .
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." - Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
. . .
"I believe that these ET (extra-terrestrial) vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury & Gemini Astronaut
. . .
"My attorney has never been able to accept the notion, often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation, that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter." - Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. . .
"James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death." - Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
. . .
"I must not fear, fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain." - Frank Herbert, Dune (Paul Atreides reciting the 'Litany Against Fear')
. . .
"The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." - Steve Furtick
. . .
"For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public.
Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury & Gemini Astronaut
. . .
"All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." - Friedrich Nietzsche
. . .
"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said 'Welcome aboard'." - Fantastic, Fallout: New Vegas
. . .
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
. . .
"Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying." - Michael O'Hara, Lady from Shanghai
. . .
"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures that made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." - Randall Monroe
. . .
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson, Neuromancer
. . .
"Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies." - Alexander the Great
. . .
"Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception." - Carl Sagan
. . .
"When the axe came into the woods, the trees said 'at least the handle is one of us'." - Turkish Proverb
. . .
"If there is a god, he will have to beg my forgiveness." - Found carved into a Jewish concentration camp prisoner barracks
. . .
"Two possibilities exist; either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C Clarke
. . .
"When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre." - Cheeseekau, Shawnee Indian
. . .
"You wanna get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone!" - Jim Malone, The Untouchables
. . .
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction." - Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of the Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
. . .
"The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors." - Plutarch
. . .
"Treat people in your debt like family; exploit them." - Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #111, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
. . .
"We cross our bridges as 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 the presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
. . .
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." - Winston Churchill
. . .
"I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity." - Dr. Amedeus Arkham, Batman: Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison & Dave McKean)
. . .
"War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
. . .
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." - Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
. . .
"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the less of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
. . .
"I remember a time when things were good. I remember steak dinners, and baked potatoes, and martini lunches, and comical drunks, and a cigarette after every course 'to aide digestion'. And the heart attacks, and the alcohol poisoning, and the lung cancer, well those were acceptable losses.
Once it seemed like we could live forever and nobody would mind." - Steve Darnall & Alex Ross , Uncle Sam
. . .
"Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing; moderation is for cowards." - Peter Berg
. . .
"Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love." - Clive Barker, Arabat: Absolute Midnight
. . .
"Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
. . .
"What is illness to the body of our knight errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls he shall rise again. Woe to the wicked! Sancho! My armor! My sword!" - Man of La Mancha (Don Quixote), Dale Wasserman
. . .
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." - Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God
. . .
"I come in peace, I didn't bring artillery, but I am pleading with you with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all." - Marine General James Mattis, to Iraqi tribal leaders
. . .
"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." - Al Capone
. . .
"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own." - H.G. Wells
. . .
"I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that." - Henry Rollins
. . .
"I only need two things; Your submission and your obedience to my will." - The Master, Doctor Who: The Daemons
. . .
"We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them." - John Waters
. . .
"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues." - Elizabeth Taylor
. . .
"Stood in street. Watched it burn.
Imagined limbless felt torsos inside; breasts blackening; bellies smoldering; busting into flame one by one.
Watched for an hour.
Nobody got out.
Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, Hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion.
There is nothing else.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them, or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs.
It's us.
Only us.
Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world." - Walter Kovacs aka Rorschach, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)
. . .
"The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" - Prof. Steven Hawking, A Brief History of Time
. . .
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it." - François-Marie Arouet
. . .
"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never persistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man." - Frank Herbert, Dune
. . .
"I like intelligent women. When you go out it shouldn't be a staring contest." - Frank Sinatra
. . .
"Semper Fidelis Tyrannosaurus (Always Faithful, Terrible Lizard)!" - Henchmen #21, The Venture Bros.
. . .
"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.
It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get..." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s
. . .
"I am going to look at the stars, They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us. All we ever see of the stars are their old photographs." - Dr. Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbens)
. . .
"Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own." - Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #47, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
. . .
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." - President John F. Kennedy
. . .
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemingway
. . .
"Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
. . .
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape." - William S. Burroughs
. . .
"The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." - Nikola Tesla
. . .
"The pain, so unexpected and undeserved had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life... My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing." - Bob Arctor, A Scanner Darkly (Philip K Dick)
. . .
"You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President!” – Nellie Connally, wife of then-Texas Governor John B. Connally, believed to be the last words JFK heard before he was shot.
. . .
"Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame." - The War Doctor, Doctor Who: Time of The Doctor
. . .
"I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and queen: moult no feather. I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act II, Scene II)
. . .
"There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need." - Werner Herzog
. . .
"..the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside." - Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Copper Beeches (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
. . .
"I was always slightly in contempt of the nice girl next door that your mother is always trying to introduce you to. Its the slut down the street that's really interesting." - Will Eisner, Creator/Writer of 'The Spirit'
. . .
"I know other astronauts share my feelings... and we know the government is sitting on hard evidence of UFOs." - Col. Gordon Cooper, Mercury and Gemini Astronaut
. . .
"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud, playwright and poet.
. . .
"I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots." - Hunter S. Thompson
. . .
“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.” - Charles Manson
. . .
"One is always considered mad, when one discovers something that others cannot grasp." - Ed Wood
. . .
"Writing is easy; all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
. . .
"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" - President Ronald Reagan
. . .
"I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder." - Werner Herzog
. . .
"Let there be no doubt. Alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, laser and fiber optic technologies, particle beams, electromagnetic propulsion systems, depleted uranium projectiles, stealth capabilities, and many others.
How do I know? I was in charge!
I think the kids on this planet are wise to the truth, and I think we ought to give it to them. I think they deserve it." - Colonel Philip Corso, Former Head of Foreign Technology at the U.S. Army's Research and Development Department at the Pentagon. Four years Director of Intelligence on President Eisenhower's White House National Security Staff.
. . .
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences." - H. P. Lovecraft
. . .
"Good evening. Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation and decay so there better be someone somewhere who does know... That's the God bullshit. And then there's the noble man bullshit. That man is a noble creature that can order his own world who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for thirty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see." - Howard Beale, Network.
. . .
"The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young." - Brother Theodore
. . .
"Why do people say 'Grow some balls'? Balls are weak and sensitive! If you really wanna get tough, grow a vagina! Those things take a pounding!" - Betty White
. . .
"Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it." - Clive Barker
. . .
"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." - The Cloths of Heaven, W.B. Yeats
. . .
"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." - Stephen King, The Dark Tower
. . .
"I love talking about the Warren Commission, I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it. I think that's interesting in what is ostensibly a democracy. Sarcasm - come on in. People say "Bill, quit talking about Kennedy man. It was a long time ago, just let it go, alright? It's a long time ago, just forget it." I'm like, alright, then don't bring up Jesus to me. As long as we're talking shelf life here..." - Bill Hicks
. . .
“We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde
. . .
"I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in." - Charles Manson
. . .
“When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.” - African proverb from Isak Dinesen’s 'Out of Africa'
. . .
"I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth." - President Harry S Truman
. . .
"We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors." - Dr. Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbens)
. . .
“A great master does not move his puppet if there is no reason to do so.” - Bunraku instruction manual
. . .
"Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that two men could be wounded seven times by two bullets? Do you believe that 18 witnesses could just magically up and die over the next three years?" - Steve Darnall & Alex Ross, Uncle Sam
. . .
"Only those who went hungry with me and stood by me when I went through a bad time at some point in life will eat at my table." - Pablo Escobar
. . .
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." - Emily Bronte, Wurthering Heights
. . .
"Politics is the entertainment division of the Military/Industrial Complex." - Frank Zappa
. . .
"Those mondo weirdo video guys, they've got unsavory connections, they play rough. Rougher than even Nicki Brand wants to play... You know, in Brazil, Central America, those kinds of places, making underground videos is considered a subversive act. They execute people for it.
In Pittsburgh, who knows?" - Max Renn, Videodrome
. . .
"But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: (1) Everything is part of it. (2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood." - Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
. . .
"I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out." - Bill Hicks
. . .
"I'm a respectable citizen. Multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous." - Hunter S. Thompson
. . .
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” - George Orwell, Animal Farm
. . .
"Every species can smell its own extinction." - John Trent, In The Mouth of Madness
. . .
"My life's been a circle of violence and degradation long as I can remember. I'm ready to tie it off." - Rustin Cohle, True Detective
. . .
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
. . .
"This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may not) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed; of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in the snow blind wastes beneath the Northern Lights; of the two women he loved and of the choice he made between them; of how he broke his most sacred oath; and how finally all the things he had were taken from him save one.
It ends with a wink. It begins in a quiet Midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet Midwestern future. Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky... but no: it's only a bird, only a plane. Superman died ten years ago.
This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?" - Alan Moore, introduction to 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?'
. . .
"You will show my head to the crowd: It is worth seeing." - Georges Danton, just before his execution.
. . .
"Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me." - Al Capone
. . .
"The U.S. Government hasn't maintained secrecy regarding UFOs It's been leaking out all over the place. But the way it's been handled is by denial, by denying the truth of the documents that have leaked. By attempting to show them as fraudulent, as bogus of some sort. There has been a very large disinformation and misinformation effort around this whole area. And one must wonder, how better to hide something out in the open than just to say, 'It isn't there. You're deceiving yourself if you think this is true.' And yet, there it is right in front of you.
So it's a disinformation effort that's concerning here, not the fact that they have kept the secret. They haven't kept it. It's been getting out into the public for fifty years or more." - Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut & 6th human to walk on the moon
. . .
“I’ve gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into me, and neither of us liked what we saw.” - Brother Theodore
. . .
"Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." - Marine General James Mattis
. . .
"How often does a grown man get to pretend to be Bela Lugosi? Not often enough." - Neil Gaiman
. . .
"Whoever controls what you see, controls what you think. That's why it's called 'Programing'." - Richard Metzger
. . .
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
. . .
"And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that goodnight
. . .
"No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people." - President William Howard Taft
. . .
"Alcohol may be mans worst enemy, but doesn't the bible say to 'Love thy Enemy'?" - Frank Sinatra
. . .
"I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up until the day he killed himself." - Johnny Carson
. . .
"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." - Walt Disney
. . .
"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." - Rustin Cohle, True Detective
. . .
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.” - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
. . .
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." - Rudyard Kipling
. . .
"A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens." - Orson Welles
. . .
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
. . .
"Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating." - William S Burroughs
. . .
"Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity." - Frank Zappa
. . .
"It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious." - Bill Hicks
. . .
"Screw the dialogue, lets wreck some cars." - Hal Needham, stuntman-turned-film
. . .
"If you have a gun, you can rob a bank. If you have a bank, you can rob anyone." - Roman Sionis aka Black Mask, Batman: Detective Comics
. . .
"When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car." - Will Rogers
. . .
"Last night, I was awakened from a fitful sleep, shortly after 2 o'clock in the morning by a shrill, sibilant, faceless voice. I couldn't make it out at first in the dark bedroom. And I said, 'I'm sorry, you will have to talk a little louder.'...And the Voice said to me: 'I want you to tell the people the truth, not an easy thing to do because the people don't want to know the truth.' And I said, 'You're kidding. What the hell should I know about the truth?' But the Voice said to me: 'Don't worry about the truth. I will put the words in your mouth.' And I said, 'What is this, the burning bush? For God's sake, I'm not Moses.' And the Voice said to me: 'And I'm not God. What has that got to do with it?'
And the Voice said to me: 'We're not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth. I don't expect you people to be capable of truth, but god-dammit, at least you're capable of self-preservation!' And I said, 'Why me?' And the Voice said: 'Because you're on television, dummy! You have 40 million Americans listening to you and after the show you could have 50 million. For Pete's sake, I'm not asking you to walk the land in sackcloth and ashes preaching the Armageddon. You're on TV, man.' So I thought about it for a moment, and then I said, 'Ok.'" - Howard Beale, Network
. . .
"It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?" - Detective Gaff, Blade Runner
. . .
"Why should I obtain by force that which I can obtain by cheating?" - Doc Holliday
. . .
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
. . .
"I was an equal opportunity merchant of death. I supplied everyone but the Salvation Army. I sold Israeli-model Uzis to Muslims. I sold Communist-made bullets to Fascists... I even shipped cargo to Afghanistan when they were fighting my fellow Soviets. I never sold to Osama bin Laden. Not on any moral grounds: back then, he was always bouncing checks." - Yuri Orlov, Lord of War
. . .
"When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons." - John Webster
. . .
"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." - Arthur Miller
. . .
"Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all." - Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. . .
"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors." - Rudyard Kipling
. . .
"All empires are created of blood and fire." - Pablo Escobar
. . .
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid." - Q, Star Trek: TNG (Ep: Q Who)
. . .
"A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." - Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Confederacy
. . .
"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death." - H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon
. . .
"Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit." - Augustus, first Roman Emperor (his last words)
. . .
+ + +
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