Bill > Bill's Quotes

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”
― Steve Martin

“That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.”
― Christopher Buckley

“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”
― Voltaire

“I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.”
― Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years

“They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Those two little words -- says you -- are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosphy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know?”
― J. Mark Bertrand, Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World

“The truth is, preparing for interstellar travel and then sending out ships filled with colonists is bound to be a job so long, thankless, expensive, and difficult that I suspect that only a religion could do it. A lot of people will find ways to make money from it. That might get things started. But it will take something as essentially human and as essentially irrational as religion to keep them focused and keep it going—for generations if it takes generations. I suspect it will. You see, I have thought about this.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“You built a life the way you’d build a wall, one brick on top of the other, but sooner or later, those first bricks were taken away.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country