Jen > Jen's Quotes

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.”
― Lao Tzu

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
― Benito Mussolini

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“The national anthem of Hell is 'I did it my way.”
― Peter Kreeft

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton