And what I wouldn't give to find a soulmate...someone to catch this drift...and what I wouldn't give to meet a kindred.
- Alonis Morissete (prolly the only one from her you'll see here ;)
- Doug Larson
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
- Will Rogers
Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
- Samuel Johnson
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
- Honore de Balzac
It isn't what they say about you; it's what they whisper.
- Errol Flynn
Taking a new step..is what people fear the most.
- Dostoyevski
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
- Albert Einstein
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to on branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.
- Seneca
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.
- Henry Louis Mencken
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
- Edward Dahlberg
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
- Oscar Wilde
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
- Henry David Thoreau
No sane man will dance.
- Cicero
Never mistake motion for action.
- Ernest Hemmingway
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
- Joseph Joubert
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
- Benjamin Disraeli
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
- Voltaire
The doer alone learneth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
- Paul Valery
If you are going to do something wrong at least enjoy it.
- Leo Rosten
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
- Lin Yutang
Music is Love in search of a word.
- Sidny Lanier
Never interupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Napolean Bonaparte
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.
- John Donne - Meditation XVII
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Oscar Wilde
The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
- Thomas Henry Huxley
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
- Henry David Thoreau
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
- Pittacus
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
- Mahatma Ghandi
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
- Oscar Wilde
The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.
- Adlai Stevenson
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin
The true meausre of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Ann Landers
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor
There are two major products to come out of Berkley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincedence.
- unknown
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
- George Bernard Shaw
There is no problem so complex that it cannot simply be blamed on the pilot.
- Earl Wiener, (Human Factors Society President)
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
- George Bernard Shaw
There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
- John Erskine
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.
- Hodding Carter
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
- Henry Louis Mencken
There's no fool like an old fool -- you can't beat experience.
- Jacob Braude
There were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes.
- unkown
They've got us surrounded again..the poor bastards!
- Creighton W. Abrams, General
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
- Robert Frost
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
- Hippocrates
My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is and why it exists as all.
- Stephen Hawkings
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
-Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.
-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no longer to bury one's head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.
-Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The two principle currencies of the world were the Yen and fellatio.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
"The dead," he had said once, "need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead."
-Peter S. Beagle, A Fine And Private Place
You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.
-Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
If I let my speech run away with me, it is because I have hatred for certain things. And you should hate them, too. They are the things that make us blind--and ignorant--and--and dirty.
-Robert E. Sherwood, Idiot's Delight
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that grey load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.
-Harold Frederick, The Damnation of Theron Ware
Fear toward God [is] a great and almost unique incitement to virtue.
-Sir Thomas More, Utopia
I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity-- through him all things fall.
-Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
-Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them with your two-edged sword, so that there should be no one to oppose your word!
-St. Augustine, Confessions
You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural science in three, literature in six.
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King
As luck would have it, Providence had been on his side--for the express purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes which are Providence's specialty.
-Alduous Huxley, Island
Philosophy is always dangerous because it promotes the creation of new ideas.
-Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
"Any woman can weep without tears," she answered over her shoulder, "and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough."
-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy.
-Tennesee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all bad poets.
-Friederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
How in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde
But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
-Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more "literary" you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils.
-Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
-Frank Herbert, The Godmakers
If you put a hungry ferret in your trousers, he'll run around. You'd be surprised at the energy.
-Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap guitarist
God's a coward and a showoff, Will. You will come to understand this, as the years go by. He hides behind a gaudy show of the forms, boasting how fine His workings are.
-Clive Barker, Sacrament
But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
A man who falls in love with a woman imperils himself, and exposes himself to the greatest troubles.
-Shaykh Nefzawi, The Perfumed Garden
Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. "What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or--or--"
-Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
"In innocence there is no strength against evil," said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. "But there is strength in it for good."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore
If a woman did not enjoy a kiss and a cuddle as much as he did, what was the point?
-Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
The beauty of chastity is that when death comes, you'll regard it as a blessed relief.
-Orson Scott Card, The Worthing Chronicle
I can't say
I've ever valued anyone else's life
More than my own, and that's the honest truth.
-Sophocles, Antigone
I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
-Ayn Rand, Anthem
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
At the root of all human virtues lies the completest egoism. And the more virtuous anything is, the more egoism there is in it.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Insulted and Injured
That the soul is immortal and that people should exist forever is a most unreasonable fancy. The trash of every age must then be preserved and new universes must be created to contain such infinite numbers.
-David Hume, Conversation with James Boswell
If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one's record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and the meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and I acted.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.
-Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Lots of people think a song without singing is not a song. Tell that to Beethoven and he'll kick your ass.
-Eddie Van Halen
The day I say, "This is good enough for me," is the day I begin to die, Poilar. I want to know what I am. After that I want to know what I'm capable of becoming. And then I want to become it. I want to keep reaching higher all the time.
-Robert Silverberg, Kingdoms of the Wall
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
But a woman friend was different from a man; you always knew her mind ran along other paths than yours, that she saw the world with different eyes.
-Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords
When we say "I don't understand," God replies, "I don't care."
-Stephen King, Coffey on the Mile
One always dies too soon--or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are--your life, and nothing else.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it's not decades away; it's right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.
-Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
I understood why the best in me had been my sins and my transgressions; and why I had never felt guilt in my sins. I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.
-Ayn Rand, Anthem
You know what I often think? ... I think we ought to get together and elect somebody else God. Me, for instance. I'll bet I'd do a much better job.
-Robert E. Sherwood, Idiot's Delight
Evidently there was an intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance, and where men asked one another, not "Is your soul saved?" but "Is your mind well furnished?"
-Harold Frederick, The Damnation of Theron Ware
And besides they'd taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake.
-Aldous Huxley, Island
It is a beautiful, utopian dream of a world without wars, banks, diplomats, and so on.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
How fate loves a jest!
-Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
-Frank Herbert, Dune
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
One thing he was sure of about women was that every last one had secret places in her heart, sometimes shared with another woman but never with a man.
-Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords
Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then... you die, or you find something else.
-Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
Don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: "This is mine"? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?
-Ayn Rand, We The Living
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
-Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
I'm afraid you deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking out of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked, just the same.
-Harold Frederick, The Damnation of Theron Ware
Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children.
-Yavgeny Zamyatin, We
In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
In every religion the priest insists on five things -- First: There is a God. Second: He has made known his will. Third: He has selected me to explain this message. Fourth: We will now take up a collection; and Fifth: Those who fail to subscribe will certainly be damned.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
Many men stumble upon the truth, but most manage to pick themselves up and continue unscathed.
-Winston Churchill
You know, I'm surprised that some people can go through life without even wondering about these things.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.
-Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
No offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour.
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
You know, it's such a peculiar thing--our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you'd feel big and solemn about? There's nothing but housewives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks, and drunken debutantes. Or their spiritual equivalents.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
God forbid that we should spoil everything by being sensible!
-Robert E. Sherwood, Idiot's Delight
Nothing done with love offends me.
-A. A. Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn
Strong is a king who destroys all, stronger still is a woman who obtains all, but strongest is wine, which drowns reason.
-Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.
-Ayn Rand, Anthem
And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
No, I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is much the same thing.
-Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
I don't want to fight for the people, I don't want to fight against the people, I don't want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone--to live.
-Ayn Rand, We The Living
Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
-Friederich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
-Stephen King, Coffey on the Mile
There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live like real human beings.
-Harold Frederick, The Damnation of Theron Ware
I can still remember what I was like when I was sixteen. It was hell to be that excited. Then as now, orgasms gave no relief. Ten minutes after an orgasm, guess what? Nothing would do but that you have another one. And there was homework besides!
-Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
The will of God or the lunacy of man--it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God.
-James Hilton, Lost Horizon
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly--except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be seen pretty well from the writings of its scholars: they advance their conjectures as blandly as dogmas and are hardly ever honestly perplexed by the exegesis of a Biblical verse. Again and again they say, "I am right for it is written," and the interpretation that follows is of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist is stopped in his tracks, torn between anger and laughter, and keeps asking himself: Is it possible? Is this honest? Is it even decent?
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn
That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization.
-Eugene Ionesco, The Lesson
How many Germans know, and demand of themselves that they should know, that there is art in every good sentence--art that must be figured out if the sentence is to be understood! A misunderstanding about its tempo, for example--and the sentence itself is misunderstood.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The point is, who are you? Not why or how, not even what.... You are the sum of so many reflections. How many reflections? Whose reflections? Is that what you consist of? What scum does the tide leave? What happens to the scum? When does it happen? I've seen what happens.... The scum is broken and sucked back. I don't see where it goes, I don't see when, what do I see, what have I seen? What have I seen, the scum or the essence?
-Harold Pinter, The Dwarfs
That we would do
We should do when we would; for this "would" changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this "should" is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
With this kind of reasoning Mr. Golyadkin succeeded at last in calming his conscience and excusing himself beforehand in his own eyes in anticipation of the expected carpeting from Andrey Philippovich for remissness in the performance of his duties. In all such circumstances our hero was in general extremely inclined to justify himself in his own eyes by irrefutable arguments, and making his conscience completely easy.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who give your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
-George Orwell, 1984
I had also discovered what happens when you say something powerful that makes people think. They become afraid of you, and they neutralize your message by giving you a label that is not open to interpretation -- as a fascist, a devil worshipper or an advocate of rape and violence.
-Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
If the gods are annoyed with me, then let them tell me so, and I'll do penance.
-Robert Silverberg, Kingdoms of the Wall
When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: "natural" qualities and those called truly "human" are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.
-Friederich Nietzsche, Homer's Contest
My God--life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle
And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.
-Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
Manliness is not all swagger and swearing and mountain climbing. Manliness is also tenderness, gentleness, consideration. You men think you can decide on who is a man, when only a woman can really know.
-Robert Anderson, Tea and Sympathy
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
-Bertrand Russell
It is I, the godless Zarathustra, who speaks: who is more godless than I, that I may enjoy his instruction?
-Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
I mean, I have to drink, to drink a lot. It makes you strong. Admittedly, even then one's road to hell is paved with open jack-knives. But it's different, nevertheless. As though one's knees were buckling, you know: yielding. So that one doesn't feel them, the knives. Elastic knees.
-Bertolt Brecht, Baal