"'there is no bad whiskey, there are only some whiskies that aren't as good as others'"
— Raymond Chandler

""I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it." "
— Raymond Chandler

"We didn't exactly believe your story, Miss O'Shaughnessy, we believed your 200 dollars. I mean you paid us more than if you had been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it alright. (Sam Spade)"
— Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon)

"Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery"
— Poul Anderson (The Stars Are Also Fire)

"'That,' he confessed aloud, 'was as ludicrous a case of mutual ineptitude as the gods of slapstick ever engineered. We both deserve to be tickled to death by small green centipedes. Well... if you keep quiet about it, I will.'"
— Poul Anderson (Flandry of Terra)

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions."
— Ayn Rand (Philosophy: Who Needs It?)

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"
— Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)

"“When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.”"
— Frédéric Bastiat

"Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either."
— Walter Scott (Bride of Lammermoor)

"That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"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

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot..."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, "equality" is a disaster."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Never try to outstubborn a cat."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough for Love)

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. "
— Robert A. Heinlein

"What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
— Robert A. Heinlein

"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill"
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear."
— Rex Stout (The Doorbell Rang)

"We must have a religion — it goes without saying — but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn’t law; it wasn’t gospel: it was only an opinion — my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn’t worth any more than the pope’s — or any less, for that matter."
— Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

"Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought."
— Iain M. Banks (Look to Windward)

"After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink."
— Iain M. Banks (Raw Spirit)

"Zach was sitting in the passenger seat, seemingly calm and happy and content with his place in the world. The git."
— Mil Millington (Love and Other Near-Death Experiences: A Novel)

"M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk."
— Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister)

"The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault."
— Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
"
— Elmore Leonard

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
— Ayn Rand

"Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book."
— Philip José Farmer

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
— Groucho Marx

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
— Groucho Marx

"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know. "
— Groucho Marx

"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped."
— Groucho Marx

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi

"A man is only as old as the woman he feels."
— Groucho Marx

"Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun. "
— Groucho Marx

"If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. I'll always be with you."
— A.A. Milne