Derrick > Derrick's Quotes

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”
― George Carlin

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.”
― James Burke, Connections

“One thing that we, as a society, don’t fully acknowledge is just how difficult, how taxing, how utterly exhausting and draining it is to care for little children. It is work, in the purest, rawest sense of the word.”
― Christopher Ingraham, If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“But I didn’t live in a world where any of my dreams were possible anymore.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Freedom begins where work ends- the realm of freedom is after hours, on the weekend, on vacation, and not at work.”
― Peter Frase

“People don't talk about anything... No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Communism — ladies and gentlemen, I say it without flinching: communism in eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba brought land reform and human services; a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history, and that's something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are very impressed; are very, very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic. To say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work and it worked for hundreds of millions of people. 'But what about the democratic rights that they lost?' We hear U.S. leaders talking about 'restoring' democracy to the communist countries, but these countries—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—were not democracies before communism. Russia was a Czarist autocracy; Poland was a right-wing fascist dictatorship under Piłsudski, with concentration camps of its own; Albania was an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927; Cuba was a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship under that butcher Batista; Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes openly allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2. So, what—exactly what democracy are we talking about restoring? The socialist countries did not take away any rights that didn't exist there in the first place.”
― Michael Parenti

“During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.”
― Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“In the end, Cuba was the Mob’s most costly defeat. They had positioned themselves as legitimate businessmen in Cuba. They had placed all their faith in the brute power of American capitalism. The more Castro’s incipient Revolution gained traction, the more the mobsters invested, in the belief that they could drown out the will of the people through a massive infusion of capital. Rampant development would trump Revolution—or at least that was how it was supposed to go. In the end, the Cuban people made their own choice, and the mobsters were chased out of town.”
― T. J. English