Simon > Simon's Quotes

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.”
― Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging

“People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“At various times, inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven't been, by and large, is seen.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“truth is not dictated by the number of likes on Twitter but rather by evidence.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth – A New York Times Bestselling Science Book on the Oumuamua Mystery and Alien Technology from Harvard's Top Astronomer

“Twitter makes you like people you’ve never met. Facebook makes you hate those you’ve known all your life.’ Anon”
― William Hanson, The Bluffer's Guide to Etiquette

“The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“While all this goes on, the English remain staunch believers in equality. Equality is a notion the English have given to humanity. Equality means that you are just as good as the next man but the next man is not half as good as you are.”
― George Mikes, How to Be a Brit

“You're born. You live. You go on some diets. You die.”
― Opus

“I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or, if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative. So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.”
― James Lee Burke, Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: ‘Each time I return to England from abroad,’ he observed, ‘the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’29”
― Philip Stephens, Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.32”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“History shows that in the absence of violent leveling events, inequality was commonly quite high relative to its theoretical maximum and could remain high for extended periods of time.”
― Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

“We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us our in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stands the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.”
― Primo Levi

“It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.

And those people are artists. They're the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that's Sonia's poetry or Ta-Nehisi's rather startlingly clear prose, it's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.”
― Toni Morrison

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”
― David Hume, On Suicide

“We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”
― Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.”
― Rose Macauley

“Every war makes other wars more likely.”
― Rose Macaulay, What Not: A Prophetic Comedy

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Miserable people with miserable lives, buggering about in a miserable, pointless parade of misery.”
― Stuart MacBride, Cold Granite

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”
― Ted Hughes

“Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath -
they're lucky, they can't die again.”
― Tony Harrison