CHM > CHM's Quotes

“The price of deviating for me turned out to be an awfully high one but, nevertheless the aim was real only because the bomb really does exist and hangs over the suburbs.”
― Elaine Tyler May , Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

“When I think of some of the problems the men students faced, I realise that they too suffer enormous stress and confusion. Don't both images have to be changed before a woman's situation truly improves?”
― Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

“It is very seldom that events stand still for long, and the paradox is that the past is nearly as opaque as the future.”
― Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction

“What are kingdoms without justice, but great robberies? asked St Augustine”
― Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction

“If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one.”
― Wendell Berry, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

“Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.”
― Wendell Berry, Feminism, the body, and the machine.: An article from: Cross Currents

“There is a world of desperation out there, seekers flocking to Vegas to be unleashed, to lose themselves and in the process sometimes find themselves, in a rite of passage shared by civilisations”
― James Patterson; Mark Seal

“Partisans of revolution, reform and counter-revolution think they have left religion behind, when all they have done is renew it in shapes they fail to recognize.”
― John Gray

“Christianity answered a need ancient polytheism could not satisfy; it gave misery meaning and value. By taking suffering out of the realm of blind chance, Christianity imposed a responsibility on those who inflicted it.”
― John Gray

“Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.”
― John Gray

“The voice of the unwritten self, once it is subjected to the linguistic codes, literary conventions, and audience expectations of a literate population, is perhaps never again the authentic voice of black American slavery.”
― Deborah. E McDowell

“Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the might load of a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries!”
― William Lloyd Garrison, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It has given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other - devils dressed in angels' robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“We are unwilling to be worshipped, for well we know that in the world's religion it means turning us out of the earth, under pretence of sending us to heaven. We are the abolitionists of slavery among women, and demand emancipation on the soil, not colonization in the clouds.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass' Paper

“Alas, a novel must be written from a place of innocence! What's that you say? Beautiful feelings make bad literature? Bullshit.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Flowers of Buffoonery

“Something beautiful happens when a human being surrenders.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Flowers of Buffoonery

“You're not a hero if you do your job. We're all just grains of sand. The act of living is farce and it's ridiculous. No, it's not ridiculous. It's a horror. Get up and do it again. Get up and do it again. Do your best to take care of your body while it falls apart anyway. People say: 'Have a good day.' There's no such thing as a good day. You can do some things during a day that might give you a little joy and a little gratification but a day is a day ... Your best hope is to have a purpose, because that provides a distraction from the fact life is a ridiculous farce and a horror.”
― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories

“For the longest time, I was so focused on being deaf in my left ear that I almost forgot my other ear was perfectly fine.”
― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories

“People like to make exceptions of themselves. They hold other people to moral codes that they aren't willing to follow themselves”
― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories

“People like to make exceptions of themselves. They hold other people to moral codes that they aren't willing to follow themselves.”
― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories

“You're not a hero if you do your job. We're all just grains of sand. The act of living is a farce and it's ridiculous. No, it's not ridiculous. It's a horror. Get up and do it again. Get up and do it again. Do your best to take care of your body while it falls apart anyway. People say: 'Have a good day.' There's no such thing as a good day. You can do some things during a day that might give you a little joy and a little gratification but a day is a day ... Your best hope is to have a purpose, because that provides a distraction from the fact life is a ridiculous farce and a horror.”
― Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Working people did not feel themselves to be alienated from the propertied classes, but they did feel themselves to be different.”
― Christopher Harvie & H. G. G. Matthew

“The traditional elite view was that Roman marriage was a cold relationship arranged by adults for their children, its purpose and heart being procreation and the protection of family resources and influence, within this the wife 'lay back and thought of Rome', while the man exercised his sexual virility not just on her, but also on concubines, whores and slave girls”
― Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans

“The visible that emerged was a tapestry of people working to make their lives as good as possible, struggling with all the emotional concurrents and enjoying all the satisfactions that came with it”
― Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans

“Fred destroyed Donald too, but not by snuffing him out like Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald's access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father's ambitions, became severely limited.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“Donald had promised those historically significant artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Realizing that removing them in one piece would cost money and slow down construction, he instead ordered that they be destroyed.”
― Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

“The trite comments about the waste of life and so on and the greedy delving into the tactics of engagement are the veneer that we use to justify the macabre entertainment value of such an extreme act of violence, part of the eternal desire for realism in voyeuristically consumed combat that, for the majority of Western men, is lacking in our daily lives.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945