Mike Robbins > Mike's Quotes

“Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Become who you are!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“If an ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox.”
― Xenophanes

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
― Stephen King

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“the remark of a Middlesex Regiment officer in 1918. “Intelligence services,” the man had said, “are prone to looking up their own arses and wondering why it’s dark.”
― David Downing, Zoo Station

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

“First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa

“There is something inherently deceptive about reality.”
― Alexandar Tomov

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”
― Patrick Meagher

“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”
― John Holt , Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“You know you're a history fan when you still get upset thinking about the library of Alexandria”
― somewhere on the internet

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background