Aidan Hall > Aidan's Quotes

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to well-open eyes.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“Soul and body, body and soul - how mysterious they were!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What convenience is there for debate in a crowd, where there is nothing but jostling, treading upon one another, and stirring of blood, than which in this case there is nothing more dangerous?”
― James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana

“I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power, that ceases only in death”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“At its core the raison d'etre of the EU is to get France and Germany to hug one another so closely that they can't get a hand free with which to thump lumps out of each other.”
― Tim Marshall, Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags

“the understanding is by the flame of the passions never enlightened, but dazzled”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”
― Alain de Botton

“Either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“The proper study of mankind is man.”
― Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

“The fact is, and there's no denying it, realism... is supposed to make one uneasy.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“In their behaviour towards creatures, all men [are] Nazis”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“man produces evil as a bee produces honey”
― William Golding, The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces

“God lost his job to bureaucrats.”
― Rutger Bregman

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If you are to punish a man retributively, you must injure him. If you are to reform him, you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
― Anton Chekhov

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“For when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs all of the others ... the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have the less you worry.

When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have three francs left, you are quite indifferent ... you are bored but you are not afraid. You think vaguely "I shall be starving in a day or two- shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.”
― George Orwell

“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Sometimes, looking at the map of Great Britain, we are struck by the improbability of the place. That strangely fashioned land with its curious prongs and protuberances, like a slender-waisted old woman soaring on piggyback over the continent of Europe, seems suddenly to acquire the air of an improvisation.”
― Robert Payne, The Canal Builders: The Story of Canal Engineers Through The Ages

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations