Voice > Voice's Quotes

“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.”
― sam harris

“We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“The handkerchief is the universal utensil of the seasoned traveler. It can be a sanitizing device, a seat cover, a dust mask, a garrote, a bandage, a gag, or a white flag. One may feel well-prepared with nothing but a pocket square.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Art is how we decorate space;
Music is how we decorate time.”
― Jean Michel Basquiat

“Suits me. I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.” She said this in her usual unguarded way. And without meaning to, she had described him exactly: a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent weeks

“You have no friends.” Senlin laughed, startling Adam. “That’s what all my friends say.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“Some friendships develop like flowers in a garden: they are conscientiously planted and nurtured. The ground about them is kept clear of competition. Then, after some weeks and months of incremental growth and laborious pruning, a flower blooms. Such cultivated friendships are agreeable and convenient, if not enduring. Other friendships seem to arise spontaneously, like an egg in a nest or a freckle upon an arm, and these are often mystifying, as both parties are left to wonder how exactly this unexpected affection took hold.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“Inevitably, invariably, eventually you will discover you are unprepared to make an informed choice. When in doubt, say, Yes. Yes is the eternal passport. Yes is the everlasting coin.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“I’m suspicious of people who are certain.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“gossip was the theater of the uneducated,”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“If one machine could do the work of so many men, what would be left for those men to do? In a thousand years, when the last human work was taken over by an automatic engine, would it conclude the liberation or the eslavement of the race?”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“Sometimes to enjoy a scene fully, we must first retreat a little way.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“It's easy to judge a life not led.”
― Josiah Bancroft

“Senlin loved nothing more in the world than a warm hearth to set his feet upon and a good book to pour his whole mind into. While an evening storm rattled the shutters and a glass of port wine warmed in his hand, Senlin would read into the wee hours of the night. He especially delighted in the old tales, the epics in which heroes set out on some impossible and noble errand, confronting the dangers in their path with fatalistic bravery. Men often died along the way, killed in brutal and unnatural ways; they were gored by war machines, trampled by steeds, and dismembered by their heartless enemies. Their deaths were boastful and lyrical and always, always more romantic than real. Death was not an end. It was an ellipsis. There was no romance in the scene before him. There were no ellipses here. The bodies lay upon the ground like broken exclamation points.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The man or woman who is rarely lost, rarely discovers anything new.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“Never let a rigid itinerary discourage you from an unexpected adventure.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark