Chris > Chris's Quotes

“Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.”
― Penn Jillette

“The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.”
― Penn Jillette

“Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th time.”
― Julie Andrews

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If I knew I had to go through those experiences again," he finally said, "I'd kill myself.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn't have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love or hate…I choose love.”
― Johnny Cash

“You just couldn't get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Nothing Alan Moore writes can be blah-blah-blahed," Park said solemnly.
Eleanor shrugged and bit her lip.
"I’m beginning to think you shouldn’t have started reading comics with a book that completely deconstructs the last fifty years of the genre," he said.
"All I’m hearing is blah, blah, blah, genre.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Don't bite his face, Eleanor told herself. It's disturbing and needy and never happens in situation comedies or movies that end with big kisses.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“During the hours spent watching the sheep as they wander aimlessly around their fields, he even wishes that someone would come and take him away, but wishes on sheep appear to work no better than wishes on stars.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

“Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.”
― Merlin Mann

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”
― John Lennon

“It's weird not to be weird.”
― John Lennon

“War is over ... If you want it.”
― John Lennon

“At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“homini lupus’, said Plautus. ‘Man is a wolf to man.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“..the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experiences more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones, and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.”
― Matt Ridley

“There has probably never been a generation since the paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past.”
― Matt Ridley