Caio > Caio's Quotes

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing.”
― Olavo de Carvalho

“A inteligência, ao contrário do dinheiro ou da saúde, tem esta peculiaridade: quanto mais você a perde, menos dá pela falta dela.”
― Olavo De Carvalho

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”
― Ernest Benn

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“Then there’s those wizards on it, who must all be gifted hydrophobes—” “You mean they hate water?” said Twoflower. “No, that wouldn’t work,” said Rincewind. “Hate is an attracting force, just like love. They really loathe it, the very idea of it revolts them.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“He was vaguely aware that he drank to forget. What made it rather pointless was that he couldn’t remember what it was he was forgetting anymore. In the end he just drank to forget about drinking.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I knew this cross-eyed gorgon once, oh, she was a terror. Kept turning her own nose to stone.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“the only way to eliminate hypocrisy from human existence is to abandon all principles whatsoever;”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

“Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

“You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain."

She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids