Benjamin Duffy > Benjamin's Quotes

“Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.”
― Dave Barry

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer.”
― Richard Herley

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”
― Caleb Carr

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”
― Stephen King

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.”
― Somerset Maugham

“It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
― Konstantin Josef Jireček