Penn Hackney > Penn's Quotes

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”
― Gore Vidal

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
― Jonathan Swift

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”
― Marcel Proust

“There's a right thing to do," Holden said.
"You don't have a right thing, friend," Miller said. "You've got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Stars are better off without us.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge

“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

“Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“It's clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there's a planetary configuration on the table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round, to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

That is no excuse," returned Mr. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction."

If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“And the moon said to me - my darling daughter, you do not have to be whole in order to shine.”
― Nichole McElhaney

“It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous...”
― Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”
― Karl Barth

“You! You can’t just walk in here! This is a crime scene!” “That would explain the dead bodies, then,” she replied. He blinked dumbly, and she sighed. Wasting good sarcasm was annoying.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

“I don’t have sad tales to tell you. I’m not some tragic character from a story, lost between two worlds. I revel in who I am. What I am.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

“Why is everyone so slavish to texts written thousands of years ago?” he snapped. “Gods can change. Grow apart. Try new things. Besides, Set was a jerk.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

“Fatma blinked at the tirade. Of all the djinn these two had to go and wake up, it had to be a bigot.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

“Why do these colonizers always claim what isn’t theirs?”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn