Michael > Michael's Quotes

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
― Claude Monet

“I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.”
― Bill Hicks

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her”
― Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

“Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.”
― ernest hemingway, To Have and Have Not

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
― Aldo Leopold

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
― Aldo Leopold

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Aldo Leopold

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
― Aldo Leopold

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Aldo Leopold

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold