Betty Cross > Betty's Quotes

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

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Beware:
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“Now I now understand what I was fightin’ for, Zel. I was fightin’ for a world where I’m free to try some things out, and find out what I really want. I’m fightin’ for a world where people can be honest with each other. That even includes the people who can’t be honest with others. People like me.”
― Betty Cross, Discarded Faces

“Writing a novel is agony.”
― George Orwell

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch – this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy.”
― Suzanne Collins

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….
I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The greedy bastard, thought Weintî. He knows perfectly well that twenty shekels is the going rate for a female household slave of my age.”
― Betty Cross, Mistress of the Topaz

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin