Ayman > Ayman's Quotes

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“If you're in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help–the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Beside them, little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“It don't take no nerve to do somepin when there ain't nothin' else you can do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“A harmonica is easy to carry. Take it out of your hip pocket, knock it against your palm to shake out the dirt and pocket fuzz and bits of tobacco. Now it’s ready. You can do anything with a harmonica: thin reedy single tone, or chords or melody with rhythm chords. You can mold the music with curved hands, making it wail and cry like bagpipes, making it full and rounds like an organ, making it as sharp and bitter as the reed pipes of the hills. And you can play it and put it back in your pocket. It is always with you, always in your pocket. And as you play, you learn new tricks, to pinch the tone with your lips, and no one teaches you. You feel around—sometimes in the tent door after supper when the women are washing up. Your foot taps gently on the ground. Your foot taps gently on the ground. Your eyebrows rise and fall in rhythm. And if you lose it or break it, why, it’s no great loss. You can buy another for a quarter.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Jesus Christ, one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun'! You win, Ma. Put away that jack handle 'fore you hurt somebody.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Times are changed, don't you know? Thinking about stuff like that don't feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody's kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you'll never get three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake

“I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called 'civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide,”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere