Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over it their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Gray Truth is now her painted toy.”
― W.B. Yeats

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
― Plato

“‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.”
― Octave Mirbeau

“And how shall I think of you?' He considered a moment and then laughed. 'Think of me with my nose in a book!”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100/Methuselah's Children

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”
― Elie Wiesel

“I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.”
― Elie Wiesel, Open Heart

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”
― Dwight David Eisenhower

“The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it’s for life.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

“There ain't nobody in the world like book people. It's a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings

“I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
― George Orwell