"...Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace."
— Albert Schweitzer

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. "
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot."
— J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye)

"Sleep tight, ya morons!"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
— George Orwell (1984)

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
— John Steinbeck

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"I guess there are never enough books."
— John Steinbeck

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."
— Tim O'Brien

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)