Heather > Heather's Quotes

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”
― Isaac Asimov

“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.”
― Isaac Asimov

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...
  This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.”
― Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction

“My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job
that he isn't worth discussing.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.”
― Isaac Asimov

“He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.”
― A. S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”
― Cornel West

“As a general guide to help the counselor make a distinction, if the experiences somehow benefit, enrich, or improve the client’s life they are NOT psychotic. However if the experiences tend to disorganize, profoundly disturb, incapacitate, or make the client dysfunctional in some way, then they are very likely psychotic.”
― Kevin M. Gardner, The Pagan Clergy's Guide for Counseling, Crisis Intervention & Otherworld Transitions

“The natural response by the lay person towards someone who is experiencing grief, because it is uncomfortable to them to hear the grieving person crying, is to try to get the person to stop crying and cheer them up. That is really the wrong approach. As unpleasant as it may be to allow someone to cry their anguished heart out on your shoulder, it is important that the person be allowed to grieve so the healing process can begin.”
― Kevin M. Gardner, The Pagan Clergy's Guide for Counseling, Crisis Intervention & Otherworld Transitions

“Rape is one area where, though the spirit may be wounded, the violation is also mental and physical and all three levels need to be treated. So if at all possible, leave the mental and physical parts to the professionals unless you have had some extensive training and experience in this area.”
― Kevin M. Gardner, The Pagan Clergy's Guide for Counseling, Crisis Intervention & Otherworld Transitions

“The key interest entity-wise is the notion of creating multiple avatars of the self; that is, multiple entities that go out and perform various functions for the magician. While that is hardly a new idea, the way the Spectre goes about it, showing how one entity splits himself off into multiple entities, is interesting and leads, I believe, to potential experimentation for the magician. For instance, the magician can take this principle and use it to multi-task, splitting hirself into multiple versions who attend to different tasks throughout the day.”
― Taylor Ellwood, Pop Culture Magick

“But writing and language can do more than just program you. It can manifest reality, as Burroughs explores in his own writing. Burroughs suggests that the act of writing manifests reality because writing manifests the future.”
― Taylor Ellwood, Pop Culture Magick

“it’s the way those types of books should be done – to acknowledge that participation and to acknowledge the fact that the comic is an artifact in your hands that is brought to life by being in someone else’s hands who then applies their consciousness to it and extracts emotions and meanings, or not, depending on who they are.”
― Cody Walker, The Anatomy of Zur-en-Arrh: Understanding Grant Morrison's Batman

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
― Stephen Fry