Marco > Marco's Quotes

“I'm not young enough to know everything.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect?”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Death isn't funny."
"Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code — family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.”
― S. M. Stirling

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
― Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
― Truman Capote

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Que no me vean caida. Muerta por dentro, pero de pie. Como un árbol.”
― Alejandro Casona, Los árboles mueren de pie

“Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.”
― Michael Dirda