James > James's Quotes

“The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.”
― Tracy Thompson

“There are some things children cannot know, because once they learn them they are no longer children.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“One possible reason why things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”
― Bette Davis

“Diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you have a chance to pick up a rock.”
― Walter Trumbull

“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
― Steven Wright

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”
― Steven Wright

“I've married some people I shouldn't have, but haven't we all?”
― Mamie Van Doren

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“If a cat spoke, it would say things like 'Hey, I don’t see the problem here.”
― Roy Blount Jr.

“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.”
― Groucho Marx

“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”
― Lily Tomlin

“(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.”
― Randall Munroe, xkcd: volume 0

“The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“In an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

“Make up a recipe for a successful revolution."
"Take large masses of injustice, resentment and frustration. Put them in a week or failing hegemon. Sir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

“In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars