K.A. Ashcomb > K.A.'s Quotes

“We look into the eyes of a dog and know ourselves in the presence of a being that forgives all debts. Surely it is some natural relation twixt our species? We can’t all have been saved by our dogs. Unless that look in their eyes is itself a kind of salvation.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Scaled Tartan

“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together, and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Stay close, do what I say and make as many mistakes as you want – just never the same one twice.”
― Jasper Fforde, Early Riser

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth: Stage Adaptation

“Thus far our meditation on quantum reality has revealed that the world of everyday matter, when properly understood, embodies concepts of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, ordinary matter is built up from atoms that are, in a rich and precise sense, tiny musical instruments. In their interplay with light, they realize a mathematical Music of the Spheres that surpasses the visions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler. In molecules and ordered materials, those atomic instruments play together as harmonious ensembles and synchronized orchestras.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“WRITE YOUR NAME.

The first thing they teach you at school.

WRITE YOUR NAME.

Sign for your first bank account.

WRITE YOUR NAME.

At the top of your exam paper.

WRITE YOUR NAME.

On the back of your bedroom door with a drippy pen.

WRITE YOUR NAME.

To log in to facebook.

WRITE YOUR NAME.
WRITE YOUR NAME.
WRITE YOUR NAME.

As if you existed.

As if you were unique.

As if you were separate.

IN YOUR NAME.

The things you own are in your name.

YOUR NAME.

That which owns, that part of you which may possess things.

And that part of you that possesses your crimes and your crimes against possession.

Write your name on the police report.

Write your name on the caution.

Your name was written on you.

Write your name.”
― Banksy, Banksy You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat

“More and more, as I think about history,” he pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 1

“But during that time, all the wise scholars and profound thinkers who ran the place fell to brooding on the nature of human society, and came to the conclusion that, left to itself, it didn’t work terribly well. And why? Because, they argued, plausibly enough, it tends to be run by idiots; kings (ruled by their own base desires and hopelessly interbred) or dictators (anyone who seizes power by that very act disqualifies himself from being trusted with it) or oligarchies (irredeemably self-serving and corrupt) or, God help us, democracies (in the republic of the stupid, the half-witted man is prime minister) – there had to be a better way, and to the wisest men in the known world, it was painfully obvious what it was. If a job needs doing, do it ourselves.”
― K.J. Parker, Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead

“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium