Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
― Walt Whitman

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”
― Woody Allen

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
― George Carlin

“I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.”
― steve martin

“Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.”
― Woody Allen

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”
― Woody Allen

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.”
― Max Weber

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
― Mark Twain

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
― Winston Churchill

“If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.”
― Keith Richards, Keith Richards: In His Own Words

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles