Olly Grace > Olly's Quotes

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty! guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.”
― Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“I do love thee so,
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven”
― William Shakespeare

“To say human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.”
― Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale

“Why was nature so beautiful for no reason at all?”
― Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale

“- Do you really hold your life so cheaply?
- Yes.”
― Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“If there’s life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe’s insane asylum.”
― Voltaire

“..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It's a pity both sides can't lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)”
― Henry Kissinger

“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“America, for once in its brief and not always glorious history, must try to learn that its own experience is peculiar in world history, that it has been unusually fortunate in coming to maturity in an epoch of untypical peace and prosperity, and that it cannot continue to judge the world by the norm of its own mythology.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism