Matt > Matt's Quotes

“Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.”
― Paul Celan

“It is a principle of nature to hate those whom you have injured.”
― Tacitus

“Once, in the South Atlantic, I saw a whaler in the process of killing a female accompanied by one of her offspring. The harpooner, a red-bearded Irishman, kept putting harpoons into the whale. The intestines were hanging out of the mangled body of the huge animal, and nevertheless it continued to swim back and forth in the water made red by its blood, trying with its shattered body to shield the little whale. Since then, and the sight of that harpooner's freckled face as he laughed derisively, and of that poor creature, faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Dan, who was writing a book on the radical activity of the twenties and thirties, took the occasion of our trip to ask me about them. The whole thing seems to me so stale that I can't imagine anybody's now wanting to write about it, but we ran over the personalities and I told him a lot of stories. It seemed to me like that grisly museum of the early 1900's that I had had him visit at Niagara Falls: old stuffed two-headed calves, motheaten panthers attacking a stag, dried-up corpses from Indian graves, big bags made of rubber tires in which people had tried to shoot the falls--and around it all-powerful industrial life that no show of resistance could stop, which had ruined the landscape of the river and was crowding out everything else. ”
― Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York

“To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.”
― Voltaire

“Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”
― Roy Medvedev

“Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.”
― Matthew Scully

“We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was skeptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. This is the true scientific spirit.”
― Karl Raimund Popper

“In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters.”
― George F. Kennan

“Consider the model of [your] local chain pharmacy, where every addictive processed food sold in the front of the store ensures that you will eventually require everything sold by the pharmacy in back.”
― John Eddy

“Man, attracted by the treasure that the victory over the whale might afford him, has troubled the peace of their immense solitary abodes, violated their refuges, sacrificed all those which the icy, unapproachable polar deserts could not screen from his blow; and the war he has had made on them has been especially cruel because he has seen that it is large catches that make his commerce prosperous, his industry vital, his sailors numerous, his navigators daring, his pilots experienced, his navies strong and his power great.

Thus it is that these giants among giants have fallen beneath his arms; and because his genius is immortal and his science now imperishable, because he has been able to multiply without limit the imaginings of his mind, they will not cease to be the victims of his interest until they have ceased to exist. In vain do they flee before him; his art will transport him to the ends of the earth; they find no sanctuary except in nothingness.”
― Bernard-Germain de La Cépède

“INTERVIEWER
Have you ever been envious of another writer?

WODEHOUSE
No, never. I’m really such a voracious reader that I’m only too grateful to get some stuff I can read.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Eighty-five percent of recorded species live in the terrestrial realm, and the majority of these, some 850,000, are arthropods (that is, insects, spiders, and crustaceans). Most of the arthropod species are insects, and almost half of these are beetles, a fact that is said to have inspired a famous epigram from the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane. On being asked, one day, by some clerical gentlemen what his study of the natural world had revealed to him about God. Haldane is said to have replied that it indicated that He had "an inordinate fondness of beetles.”
― Richard E. Leakey, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind

“On my way out of [Atlantic City] at quarter after seven in the morning, a young pump jockey at the gas station [...] mentioned that another man had lost $20,000 at Trop World a few hours earlier and had to be dragged out of the casino kicking and screaming. I asked if this happened a lot. "Man," he said, "there's a whole world of losers out there, and sooner or later they all end up here. Only they don't think they're losers. When they find out, it's like the surprise of their life.”
― James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

“The regime's political strategy depends on planting landmines throughout society. But the mine doesn't explode if you place your leg on it - it explodes when you remove your leg from it. The regime planted the land mines, then placed our legs on them so that if the regime goes, society will explode.”
― Anwar Al-Bunni

“The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here's a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it's part of Asia.”
― B.R. Myers

“Kids: get away from the cell phones, get away from the computers, and mail someone a fish before it’s too late.”
― Tom Magliozzi

“Etwas Besseres als den Tod findest du überall.”
― The Brothers Grimm

“Explaining basic probability to a group of people can be best qualified as futile.”
― Dan Szymborski

“INTERVIEWER: Why are you working as a home security guard? Aren’t there things you’d like to do?

H.S. GUARD: There’s not really anything I’d like to do. I’m more hoping for the world to end quickly.”
― Anonymous

“What aristocratic writers are given by nature for nothing, commoners acquire at the cost of their youth”
― Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters