Isa > Isa's Quotes

“Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side "I" and on the other "We," OneState. It's clear, isn't it? - to assert that "I" have certain "rights" with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you're a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:]

Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.

Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system?

Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“What fresh hell is this?”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
― Dorothy Parker

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Ladies of the Corridor

“I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.”
― Dorothy Parker

“How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Dear father, to whom will you give me away?"
He said it a second, and then a third time.
The father, seized by anger, replied: "To Death, I give you away.”
― Katha Upanishad

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will--millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space--unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible but was actually taking place. . . . He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it. Because the singularity sent out no warnings. The point of no return--the limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pull--had no sign or demarcation. Whoever crossed it was beyond hope. Their destiny was set, as all possible trajectories led irrevocably to the singularity. And if such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Schwarzschild complains of something strange that has begun to grow inside him: “I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“School, Frankie, school. The books, the books, the books. Get out of Limerick before your legs rot and your mind collapses entirely.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”
― Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words

“To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.”
― Miri Yū, Tokyo Ueno Station

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
― William Wordsworth, I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud

“Life was a road, and if departed from at a tangent, the longer for it. And a long road was a long life - a case where to travel was better than to arrive, the point of arrival being, after all, always the same: death.”
― Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

“As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst. Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work. After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.”
― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“If I get up, I have to see people. And do things. Noooo...”
― Sarah Andersen, Adulthood Is a Myth

“Ponder this for a moment. Newborn ducklings, with the briefest of exposure to sensory stimuli, detect patterns in what they see, form abstract notions of similarity/dissimilarity, and then will recognize those abstractions in stimuli they see later and act upon them.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“What gives me the right to speak of an “I,” and even of an “I” as cause, and finally of an “I” as cause of thought? . . . A thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want. —Friedrich Nietzsche For”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“The Lorax: Which way does a tree fall?
The Once-ler: Uh, down?
The Lorax: A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax