Siddharth > Siddharth's Quotes

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad”
― Christina Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: An Anthology

“Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, seized this man for the fair form that was taken from me, the manner still hurts me. Love which absolves no beloved one from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet”
― Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: An Anthology

“Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Conqueror I might be of the house but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possesor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit -- with will and energy, and virtue and purity -- that I want: not alone your brittle frame”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I believe it was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on when I left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to rising sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the disseverment of bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I thought of drear flight and homeless wandering --- and oh! with agony I thought of what I left.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

“Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective

“The world's perverse, but it could be worse.”
― Mona Van Duyn

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“This was the strategy that concerned Podhorzer, who worried that the approach reflected “an overconfidence in the liberal mind that only a fool would vote for Bush again, so therefore all we had to do was base turnout.” He returned to the AFL dispirited by his exchange with the Kerry campaign and his sense that Democrats had chosen to ignore winnable votes in part because the statistical methods used to identify them were not properly understood by campaign decision makers. “At the time,” says Podhorzer, “all of this just sounded like alien talk to most people.”
― Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

“The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.”
― Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

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

“Consumerism provides no psychological satisfaction, because there is no limit to our desires for things that we never needed in the first place.”
― Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca

“She went back to the computer, typed in $50, and then sat back, feeling relieved. It was a bit of insurance. So as long her maximum was the highest, she would still win. 3:59. Less than a minute left. She began to count down, and then, with only twenty seconds to go, the bid jumped to $32.45. And then it jumped again, and again! Not one, but two snipers were bidding on her Hansel and Gretel! She held her breath and crossed her fingers and counted—five, four, three, two . . . The Congratulations, You’ve Won! message popped on to her screen, along with her winning bid. $49.45. She sat back in her chair, triumphant. It felt so good to win.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness