Jon > Jon's Quotes

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself”
― Jose Marti

“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.
Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?”
― Brian Tracy

“I'm a misunderstood genius."
"What's misunderstood?"
"Nobody thinks I'm a genius.”
― Bill Watterson

“Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.”
― Criss Jami

“When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”
― Criss Jami

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”
― Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972

“I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.”
― Mel Brooks

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have.
A solution. A remedy. Anything.

...I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be.
Somehow I knew I deserved this.”
― Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide

“The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.”
― Hugh MacLeod

“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
― Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
― William Shakespeare , Hamlet

“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
― Milton Friedman

“A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
― George Bernard Shaw