Rob > Rob's Quotes

“They’d been brought up to it and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

“Extreme positions are not relieved by more moderate ones, but by extreme opposite positions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“When you know about something it stops being a nightmare. When you know how to fight something, it stops being so threatening.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Krew elfów

“To be neutral does not mean to be indifferent or insensitive. You don't have to kill your feelings. It's enough to kill hatred within yourself.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Krew elfów

“Godspeed, little taters. My life depends on you.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“By my reckoning, I'm about 100 kilometers from Pathfinder. Technically it's called "Carl Sagan Memorial Station." But with all due respect to Carl, I can call it whatever the hell I want. I'm the King of Mars.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“As usual, I’m working with stuff that was deliberately designed not to burn. But no amount of careful design by NASA can get around a determined arsonist with a tank of pure oxygen.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“[08:31] JPL: Good, keep us posted on any mechanical or electronic problems. By the way, the name of the probe we’re sending is Iris. Named after the Greek goddess who traveled the heavens with the speed of wind. She’s also the goddess of rainbows. [08:47] WATNEY: Gay probe coming to save me. Got it.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Learning, in an age where it was the light to theocratic darkness, was to be feared and reviled because it threatened vested interests.”
― Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between

“I heard her calling to me from caverns so deep in herself she was never aware of her own voice.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system.” “Of course there is. Doesn’t that fit human nature?”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout.”
― Norman Mailer, The Fight

“No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing.”
― Norman Mailer, The Fight

“As it was a time of war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, and as he saw the Catholics exterminate the Huguenots and the Huguenots exterminate the Catholics--all in the name of religion--he adopted a mixed belief which permitted him to be sometimes Catholic, sometimes a Huguenot. Now, he was accustomed to walk with his fowling piece on his shoulder, behind the hedges which border the roads, and when he saw a Catholic coming alone, the Protestant religion immediately prevailed in his mind. He lowered his gun in the direction of the traveler; then, when he was within ten paces of him, he commenced a conversation which almost always ended by the traveler's abandoning his purse to save his life. It goes without saying that when he saw a Huguenot coming, he felt himself filled with such ardent Catholic zeal that he could not understand how, a quarter of an hour before, he had been able to have any doubts upon the superiority of our holy religion.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“History may not be a very practical study, but it teaches some useful lessons, one of which is that nothing is accidental, and that if men move in a given direction, they do so in obedience to an impulsion as automatic as is the impulsion of gravitation.”
― Brooks Adams, The Theory of Social Revolutions

“If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The man, he believed with an instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist, must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.”
― Okakura Kakuzo

“People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Suddenly all I wanted to do was watch Gronk do his thang-thang in the zone place there. My vagina demanded it.”
― Lacey Noonan, A Gronking to Remember

“I consider myself to be a man of principle. But, what man does not? Even the cutthroat, I have noticed, considers his actions "moral" after a fashion.

Perhaps another person, reading of my life, would name me a religious tyrant. He could call me arrogant. What is to make that man's opinion any less valid than my own?

I guess it all comes down to one fact: In the end, I'm the one with the armies.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire