Smiley III > Smiley's Quotes

“Some automatic responses are good — they're skills, and we need them for life and labor. But the tendency to accumulate programming tends to have a life of its own — or more accurately, to steal the life that belongs to us.”
― John Shirley, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas

“The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs — to dictate purposes to God.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness

“I know not what you mean by malignants. We are all malignants to God.”
― Charles II

“Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World

“It is a safe bet that every publicly held idea, every received convention, is foolishness, for it has suited the majority.”
― Chamfort Sébastien-Roch-Ni 1740?-1794

“Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.”
― G. I. Gurdjief

“I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles ... There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“However paradoxical it may seem, the film studio's ideal would be to produce only one film which would go on making money forever.”
― Jean Vigo, Complete Jean Vigo: Scripts

“The movies are probably a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“You can't keep the whole Bible balanced in your head. You wouldn't have room to remember your name.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“We dance past states of saints in somebody else's religion. To m they're just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In a world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The sun's outside the bathroom window, trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“How the agent explained this to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium — indifference.”
― Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

“All throughout the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society ... Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Truth, and the freedom to seek it, are not luxury-products which enervate a people and unfit them for the struggle of life. They belong to life, they are life's daily bread.”
― Thomas Mann

“In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting

“It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“Actions may be judged according to time and place, and their values may change; but style, language (apart from content) are crystallized at the moment.”
― Erika Mann, School for Barbarians