Quotations

For the past few years, I've been keeping a Word document saved with a fucking massive list of all the best quotes I've ever come across. Here's a few of my favorites. Okay, it's more like three-fourths of them. Have fun.



"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
-Kurt Vonnegut, fictional gravestone epitaph from Slaughterhouse-Five

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"
-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers."
-Kurt Vonnegut



“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
-Bertrand Russell

“Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”
-Bertrand Russell

“None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.”
-Bertrand Russell



"While I breathe, I hope."
-Cicero



“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”
-Thomas Paine

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
-Thomas Paine



"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization."
-Robert G. Ingersoll



"Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open."
-Emma Goldman



"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
-Albert Einstein

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
-Albert Einstein



“You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.”
-Ernest Hemingway



"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
-Carl Sagan

"Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it."
-Carl Sagan

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
-Carl Sagan



"Three cheers for the flight of thought, three cheers for the perils of life in service to the idea, three cheers for the hardships of battle, three cheers for the festive jubilation of victory, three cheers for the dance in the vortex of the infinite, three cheers for the cresting waves that hide me in the abyss, three cheers for the cresting waves that fling me above the stars!"
-Soren Kierkegaard



"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-George Orwell



“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
-Galileo Galilei



“There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils only exist in its abuses.”
-Andrew Jackson



"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

“I don't like to hear cut, canned, dried sermons. When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act like he was fighting bees.”
-Abraham Lincoln

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."
-Abraham Lincoln



“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling



“You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.”
-Malcolm X

“When one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings, I say he's a sinner.”
-Malcolm X

“Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
-Malcolm X



"Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?"
-Joseph Heller, in the mouth of Yossarian in Catch 22



"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian



“Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.



"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."
-Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek



“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche



"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-Eleanor Roosevelt



“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
-Charles Bukowski



"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous; he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-Mark Twain



"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
-Oscar Wilde



"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
-Mohandas Gandhi



"A man is a god in ruins."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson



"Death is nothing to us. When we exist death is not, and when death exists we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, there is neither pleasure or pain. The fear of death arises from the false belief that in death there is awareness."
-Epicurus



"In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves... That (refering to the bible in the court room) teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them."... I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"
-Final statement of radical abolitionist John Brown at his trial



“Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. . . Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!”
-Leon Trotsky



“I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding another smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.”
-Sir Isaac Newton



“I realize that in my downward spiral of hopelessness, I was actually falling into the huge hole created by my absence of basic human graces. Most obvious was forgiveness. If I was wronged by anyone, in or out of the club, I had to be compensated—money or blood. There is no turning the other cheek. When relationships become a ledger of profit and loss, you have no friends, no loved ones, just pluses and minuses. You are absolutely alone.”
-John Teller, Sons of Anarchy



“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
-Edward Murrow



“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
-Plato



"Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back."
-Al Swearengin, Deadwood



"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge



“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte

“Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte



“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”
-Winston Churchill



“When we lack belief in gods, we're free to recognize that we alone fill our world with love and compassion, or fear and violence, and that the solutions to our problems lie in no hands but yours and mine.”
-Youtuber QualiaSoup



“I know we're not saints, or virgins, or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes; we can catch buses and count change. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
-Dylan Thomas



“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-Robert A. Heinlein



Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-William Ernest Henley