Steve > Steve's Quotes

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“My brothers, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.

An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!

This day we fight!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
― Edward Abbey

“We are all too fond of naive answers to complex questions, because it relieves us of the necessity of thinking hard and it permits us to find a scapegoat for our own mistakes. The simple answer almost always places the blame on someone else. We need to pluralize our thinking, to recognize that if you ask the wrong question, you cannot get the right answers.”
― Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

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

“When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“America is daily attacked for cowboy interventionism and arrogant unilateralism--then simultaneously attacked for not acting unilaterally to cleanse the planet of all tyranny.”
― Charles Krauthammer

“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to slide across
the finish line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, and shouting GERONIMO!!!”
― Bill McKenna

“May you learn to appreciate the magic of a firefly and the majesty of a mountain.”
― Lee Pitts, People Who Live at the End of Dirt Roads

“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“Service to one’s country does give you tremendous perspective what is at stake should we lose the freedom we have. Because in terms of freedom, America is the last, best hope on Earth. -- Captain (Ret.) Sean Parnell, US Army in "Modern Warriors”
― Pete Hegseth, Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes

“The closest thing I’ve ever seen to God is when you see people sacrifice knowingly without Any concern for themselves. -- Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, US Army in "Modern Warriors”
― Pete Hegseth, Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes

“Route 66 is a symbol for relishing life through-and-through via the senses; the Interstate represents missing out on life. You go from point A (birth) to point B (death) utterly oblivious to what’s happening in between.”
― Dan Grajek, The Last Hobo: A Clueless Detroit Kid Hitchhikes Across America the Summer the Seventies Ran Out of Gas

“Like Robert frost, my heart ached to be in the pastoral countryside. On the Interstate, you really never leave the city. The two asphalt slabs are always surrounded by a continuous, homogeneous channel of pavement, cables and wires, and urban sprawl.”
― Dan Grajek, The Last Hobo: A Clueless Detroit Kid Hitchhikes Across America the Summer the Seventies Ran Out of Gas

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey

“A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

“There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

“You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it. But he knew, and he would know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind. He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their power and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one as feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done. "The Trap of Solid Gold" in "End of the Tiger and Other Stories”
― John MacDonald

“Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet you can't win.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“There is no such thing as a clever crook. If he was really that clever he wouldn’t be a crook at all.”
― Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure

“Nothing in his life had given him confidence in his hold upon the future. All he had learned indicated that one lived by avoiding trouble, or if it could not be avoided, seeing it first.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Californios

“Princes & Kings

Isn't it strange how princes and kings,
and clowns that caper in sawdust rings,
and common people, like you and me,
are builders for eternity?

Each is given a list of rules;
a shapeless mass; a bag of tools.
And each must fashion, ere life is flown,
A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone.”
― R. Lee Sharpe

“The more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

“A man is as big as his dreams are. If you want to make big tracks on the land, you got step out and start walking.”
― Louis L'Amour, How the West Was Won

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code