Daniel Montague > Daniel's Quotes

“That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Not much because all aid is political. When this country (Malawi) became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn't have many. The donors aren't contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and contributes to underdevelopment. It's not social or cultural and it certainly isn't economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“One goes through life like a flower with its face turned to the sun, ever seeking, ever hoping, wanting to trust others, but afraid to do so. How much better if we trusted one another, if we saw only the good things, the finer things in our fellow creatures! How much better if we were frank and open, if we went on our ways without the cloak of hypocrisy and lies that we wear now.”
― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

“I thought that any joy in my life had to be paid for with something unpleasant. Perhaps this was a fatal law.”
― Carmen Laforet, Nada

“It was going to be one of those days that in appearance are like all the rest, inoffensive like the rest, but one on which a very faint stroke suddenly changes the course of our life and moves it into a new period.”
― Carmen Laforet, Nada

“I was distracted all the way home, thinking that you always move in the same circle of people no matter how many turns you seem to make.”
― Carmen Laforet

“Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I'm greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information.”
― Ian McEwan, Nutshell

“Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations

“We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses
of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate.”
― Ozzy Osbourne, Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz | Electric Guitar TAB Songbook | Medium Level | Note for Note Randy Rhoads Transcriptions with Standard Notation and ... Metal Performance Study

“Exact numbers are hard to come by in China, a country with a penchant for statistics but a political culture that prefers not to publicize them when they present any inconvenient truth.”
― Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

“What do you think is the biggest waste of time?"
"Comparing yourself to others," said the mole.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”
― David Simon

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen

“I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of 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; with 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.

And when the dumbing down of America 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

“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

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The miracle is this - the more we share, the more we have.”
― Leonard Nimoy

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”
― Terence Mckenna

“Sometimes I think it is the fear of falling down that makes people trip up. We're not born afraid. When we're young, we don't hesitate to run, or climb, or jump and we don't worry about getting hurt or fret about failure. Rejection and real life teaches us to fear, but if you want something badly enough, you have to take the leap.”
― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Fascists always attack minorities,
Which is an irony,
'Cos fascists are a minority.”
― Harry Whitewolf, Underdogs Unite

“The most dangerous worldviews are the worldviews of those who have never viewed the world.”
― Alexander von Humboldt