Jonathon > Jonathon's Quotes

“Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“Blessed are the dumbfucks.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“She's so small, yet she contains so much evil.”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth

“There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.”
― Pierre Dos Utt, Tanstaafl: A Plan for a New Economic World Order

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
― robert heinlein

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion

“Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”
― Richard Russo

“I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”
― Richard Russo

“To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man