R_ > R_'s Quotes

“It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you’re perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you’re perceived to be alluringly stupid.”
― Jon Ronson, Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

“Even a good, inveterate atheist like physicist Richard Feynman once said of the fine structure constant, “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it…. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and we don’t know how He pushed His pencil.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Fex urbis, lex orbis" (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It appeared that the swift wings of their desires would have shattered against the iron gates of the impossible.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks— an existence of soft and eternal peace.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“We once again man the barricades -- alone. Berated by our smug, so-called allies, of the Western Democracies. Islam is going to turn this world inside out before this century is out and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it.”
― Leon Uris, The Haj

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

“It’s better for us all to die together, proud, than have them discredit us and take us apart and make us look like a bunch of crazy people,” he said. “What do you think everybody committing suicide will look like?” Stephan wanted to know. “Well, at first, maybe they’ll think we’re crazy,” Jones said. “But it’s going to go down in history as a great act.”
― Tim Reiterman

“Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.”
― Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“He kept his gaze riveted upon her as a loving man watches the unselfish toil of a delicate woman upon the slender thread of whose existence is hung the whole meaning and joy of the world.”
― Joseph Conrad

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-Thomas Jefferson”
― Thomas Jefferson

“They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful.”
― Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

“The righteous man departs, but his light remains”
― Dostoevskiy Fedor Mihaylovichsky

“A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

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