"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
"
— Leo Tolstoy

"How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?"
— Malcolm X

"Truth is on the side of the oppressed."
— Malcolm X

"If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore
"
— Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic)

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"Being crazy isn't enough."
— Dr. Seuss

"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Ask for work. If they do nt give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."
— Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
— Ernest Hemingway

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."
— Charles Bukowski

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
— Charles Bukowski

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."
— Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye: A Novel)

"there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"
— Charles Bukowski

"Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned."
— Charles Bukowski (The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems)

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
— David Foster Wallace

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?""
— David Foster Wallace

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— William S. Burroughs

"Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Bend Sinister)

"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."
— Aldous Huxley

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."
— Aldous Huxley

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
— Aldous Huxley

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
— Aldous Huxley