Rob > Rob's Quotes

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell

“For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.”
― Will Durant

“Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.”
― Eric Hoffer

“The same benefits misleadingly associated with religion — security, spiritual comfort, dogmatic relief from doubt — are thought to flow from a therapeutic politics of identity. In effect, identity politics has come to serve as a substitute for religion — or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion.
These developments shed further light on the decline of democratic debate. ‘Diversity’ — a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it — has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“But all this world is like a tale we hear -
Men's evil, and their glory, disappear.”
― Abolghasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

“It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Selected Essays

“Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.”
― Jack Vance

“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.”
― Will Durant

“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”
― Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth

“In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.”
― Maureen F. McHugh

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
― George Orwell, The Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to The Complete Works of George Orwell

“We prostrate ourselves before the fish-god Yob, who seems as efficacious as any.”
― Jack Vance

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“One becomes sated with platitudes no less than honey, so that one often breaks another's bones in one's vexation.”
― Jack Vance

“Who would sharpen a point aginst the darkness of the world?”
― William Golding, The Inheritors

“The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind

“The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”
― Christopher Lasch

“He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.”
― Jack Vance Maske Thaery