Vilena > Vilena's Quotes

“All is over…I have nothing but you, remember that.”
“I can never forget what is my whole life.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Tolerance fails as a virtue, first of all, because it is in some ways demeaning to people. It is much better to speak of “respect” or “empathy.” But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center. Thus we fall back on “tolerance,” which merely means conceding to people the right to be who they are, while withholding our respect. But the determined advocates of tolerance are not content with that and keep slipping back into making tolerance imply the necessity of respect . . . Thus the obligation of tolerance leads inexorably to intolerance, turning the claim to be tolerant into a tautology, a statement that merely repeats itself—“I am tolerant except about those things of which I am intolerant.”
― Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future

“I see you are already as timid as a slave: you might as well be in love.”
― Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“You don't know the difference between truth and make-believe. You never stop acting. It's second nature to you. You act when there's a party here. You act to the servants, you act to father, you act to me. To me you act the part of the fond, indulgent, celebrated mother. You don't exist, you're only the innumerable parts you've played. I've often wondered if there was ever a you or if you were never anything more than a vehicle for all these other people that you've pretended to be. When I've seen you go into an empty room I've sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I've been afraid to in case I found nobody there.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre

“Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.”
― Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
― John Adams, The Portable John Adams

“Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of “communism” in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against “altruistic” bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of The Herd: Or, Procrustes at Large

“It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons,”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Who is John Galt?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The less we love her when we woo her,
The more we draw a woman in,”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose--that it may violate property instead of protecting it--then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind,— the omnipotence of the law,—the infallibility of the legislator: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“This line of reasoning brings us to a challenging question: If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“But what do the socialists do? They cleverly disguise this legal plunder from others -- and even from themselves -- under the seductive names of fraternity, unity, organization, and association. Because we ask so little from the law -- only justice -- the socialists thereby assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization, and association.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you. All those things are said against you because they want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, you’re sending a message to people who are rooting for you, who are agreeing with you. The message is that they can do it, too.”
― Andrew Breitbart

“The army of the emboldened and gleefully ill-informed is growing.”
― Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

“They are for ‘freedom’ when it is freedom to kill third-term fetuses or engage in same-sex marriages or stuff coke up their noses; they do not define freedom as anything to do with captive peoples around the world having the chance to escape the tyrannies that constrain them. They like Fidel because he is a thorn in America’s side and a sort of dime-store existentialist, and they rhapsodize about his spreading of literacy in Cuba without considering the fact that at the same time that he teaches people to read he tortures writers like Armando Valladares whose books he doesn’t like.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”
― T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture

“What I have called Appreciative love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted: and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling. Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: A captivating journey through the different forms of love

“Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.”
― Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“In an egalitarian and democraticised society (in the broader sense of the term); in a society in which there are no longer any casts, functional organic classes or Orders; in a society in which ‘culture’ is standardised, extrinsic, utilitarian, and tradition is no longer a living, forming force; in a society in which Pindar’s ‘be thyself’ has become but a meaningless phrase;19 in a society in which character amounts to a luxury that only fools can afford, whereas inner weakness is the norm; in a society, finally, in which whatever lies above racial, ethnic and national difference has been replaced by what effectively lies below all this and which, therefore, has a shapeless and hybrid character — in such a society, forces are at work that in the long run are bound to influence the very constitution of individuals, thus affecting everything typical and differentiated, even in the psycho-physical field.”
― Julius Evola, The Bow and the Club

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina