Alex > Alex's Quotes

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding—symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“It was a pity he couldn't do an O level in beetle smell. Or rat identification, or birdsong.”
― Chris Packham, Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir

“But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never.”
― David Gemmell, Legend

“But the baresark loses all fear; his is all-out attack, and invariably he takes his opponent with him even if he falls.”
― David Gemmell, Legend

“Hope is a vein of gold, faith makes the weakest soul bold, and loving kindness warms those lost in despairing cold.”
― Nick Crutchley, The Moment Between Two Thoughts

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“True masters are those who've chosen to make a life rather than a living.”
― Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1

“My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
― Frederich Engels

“We've lost sight of
How simple the task
Really is—
Hunt. Gather. Live.
It's all been overly simplified
In a complicated way.
Now we're left
just looking at each other.

What's worse
Is when one's sight
Is only as far as
A cell phone's light—
When one's reach
Is only as far as
A computer screen.

Somedays, I could smash it all
With my bare hands.
This hand held devise
Is trying to put my life
In a rectangle
&The wild Animal
Doesn't. Quite. Like. It.”
― A. Lynn Blumer, Maiden Voyage

“Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.”
― Lance Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
― Voltaire

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.”
― Federico Fellini

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.”
― Madonna

“Thousands of blue dresses
boring the sun”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Table for One zine

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“one day, you're not You
anymore

you become the Terror
sewn into your spine

there's no safe place to go
because the One you trusted

is the Lost and Lowdown
seamstress

you live for a while as the Terror
and absorb the experience

but after the Terror,
there is something so glorious...”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Not Your Kind: The Gaslit Files

“The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation