Jyvur Entropy > Jyvur's Quotes

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
Drink and be filled up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent weeks

“Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence. I cringed with hate whenever I heard other children laughing, as they played outside. My stomach coiled whenever I smelled food that was about to be served to somebody else, knowing it wasn't for me.”
― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"

“THE TERM ‘INDEPENDENT WOMAN’ Seriously, I respect anyone who works hard and is solvent, but what do these people expect – a medal? For being self-sufficient? THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE INDEPENDENT. FOREVER. It’s called adulthood.”
― Peter Lloyd, Stand By Your Manhood: An Essential Guide for Modern Men

“The overrated, unfashionable gender. The one social group it’s politically correct – no, no – virtuous to dislike. In fact, man-bashing has become mainstream, so lucrative that people build entire careers on it – which might explain why, for many, it musn’t be ruined with a reality check.”
― Peter Lloyd, Stand By Your Manhood: An Essential Guide for Modern Men

“The race bullies win by relying on racial guilt. But collective racial guilt can only separate Americans. We are individuals, not homogenous members of racial subsets. Only when we learn to cherish the words of Martin Luther King, judging people as individuals, will we truly have the guts to stand up to the race bullies. After all, to paraphrase a man who once stood for unification rather than division, we're not black America or white America. We're the United States of America. We're brothers and sisters.

If we don't begin to recognize that simple truth -- and recognize the inherent goodness of America, and our ability to look beyond skin color and ethnic heritage -- the race bullies will continue to tear American down for their own political gain, brick by brick.”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans

“No wonder the left seeks to avoid political debate at all costs. Why bother? Members of the left are not interested in having a debate about policy. They are not interested in debating what is right or wrong for the country. They are interested in debating you personally. They are interested in castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree. This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you. And if they can instill that sense of moral superiority in others by making you the bad guy, they will.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons,”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies

“There will be no conversation in which you call me a racist, and I explain why I’m not a racist. That’s a conversation for idiots.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“It’s far more common for leftists to routinely pick up weapons and try to kill those with whom they disagree than it is for those on the other side of the ideological spectrum.”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies

“The left is expert at framing debates. They have buzzwords they use to direct the debate toward unwinnable positions for you. They are tolerant, diverse, fighters for social justice; if you oppose them, by contrast, you are intolerant, xenophobic, and in favor of injustice. Now, all these terms are – to be polite – a crock, if considered as absolute moral values. The left is wildly intolerant of religious people and conservatives; that’s why they’re interested in forcing Christian bakers to cater to same-sex weddings. They are anti-intellectual diversity, particularly in areas of American life in which they predominate; that’s why they stifle conservatism on campus and in the media. And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The left’s use of magical buzzwords places you in a corner, against supposed universal values that aren’t universal or universally held.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“The leftist philosophy of violence is simple: It’s good when it’s being used for leftist causes. It’s bad when it’s being used for any other purpose.”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies

“College students’ sense of moral righteousness doesn’t come from achievement – it comes from believing that you are a bad person. You are a racist and sexist; they are not. That makes them good, even if they don’t give charity, have never met a black person, stand for policies that impoverish minority communities across the United States, and enable America-haters around the globe. It”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“The truth is that your opponent, who labels you a racist without evidence, is the actual racist: it is he who waters down the term racism until it is meaningless by labeling any argument with which he disagrees racist.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents—nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today’s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents—not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there.”
― Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future

“The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.”
― Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

“I've never seen anyone's life get better by complaining about reality, I've seen it get better by accepting reality as it is and then making personal decisions to make it better.”
― Ben Shapiro

“Don’t follow people. Follow principle.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“Real-life teens wish they could live like the teens Hollywood promotes. Everyone has sex, and relationships are deep and meaningful, even if they only last a couple episodes. There are never any consequences to any action, except for experiencing the angst of teenage life alongside the characters. When a generation becomes desensitized to the ramifications of the culture around them, it’s natural to seek out any sort of feeling, even angst.”
― Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future

“This sort of bullying isn’t just present at the universities. It has taken over the media wholesale. For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being. The same is eminently true in Hollywood, where moral narrative is the heart of the business.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“To take another example, with regard to healthcare, the left suggests that their entire goal is to make healthcare available to everyone. But they don’t mandate that a certain percentage of the population go to medical school. That’s because in order for government to guarantee a product’s availability, the government must either hire workers or force workers to get into a given industry. The government hiring workers would require paying money for doctors – and the left argues that doctors already make too much money. And the left won’t argue openly for what they would prefer: forcing people to practice medicine for patients deemed worthy by the government. Unless you are willing to force people using the law to go to medical school, you cannot have a successful universal healthcare system. That’s what they’re finding out in Britain, Canada, and Israel – all countries in which private medicine is on the rise, legally or illegally, outside government auspices.”
― Ben Shapiro, How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

“This type of rhetoric is all too common among secularists on the left. They paint a false dichotomy between religion and science. They say that religious people are anti-science, because science makes God irrelevant—therefore, religious people want to stop scientific progress. They point to the fact that many religious people are skeptical about the theory of evolution—as though skepticism of a scientific finding were in and of itself unscientific.”
― Ben Shapiro, Bullies

“You know what's fun? Christmas lights. They are twinkly an pretty and they make me happy, because they are twinkly and pretty.”
― Ben Shapiro

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.”
― Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth