Hugh > Hugh's Quotes

“I’m the frosting on America’s cake, and tonight I’m willing to let you lick the bowl.”
― Stephen Colbert

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
― Bill Bryson

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.”
― Albert Einstein

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays: Marathon Man - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - The Princess Bride - Misery

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
― Victor Hugo

“I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies. And not everybody wants those hairy little things.”
― Tori Amos

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“There's no difference between one's killing
and making decisions that will send others to kill.
It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.”
― Golda Meir

“The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America. Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688. “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.” The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“We should never want to become anyone else, because the greatest fulfillment we can ever get out of life is by becoming the best possible version of ourselves.”
― Alexi Pappas, Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas

“Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn't something you earn. Your worth isn't something you buy. Your worth isn't something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn't disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. It has delicate-looking flowers, with purple petals that seem as though they might blow away in the wind, yet it thrives in the Arctic. The flowers survive by clustering together, low to the ground, offering each other shelter against the hardest conditions on earth.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“I hope this email finds you well I hope this email finds you calm. I hope this email finds you unflustered about your inbox. I hope this email finds you in a state of acceptance that this email isn’t exactly important in the cosmic scheme of things. I hope this email finds your work happily unfinished. I hope this email finds you beneath a beautiful sky with the wind tenderly caressing your hair like an invisible mother. I hope this email finds you lying on a beach, or maybe beside a lake. I hope this email finds you with the sunlight on your face. I hope this email finds you eating some blissfully sweet grapes. I hope this email finds you well but, you know what, it is okay if it doesn’t because we all have bad days. I hope this email finds you reading a really good poem or something else that requires no direct response from you. I hope this email finds you far away from this email.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“I believe in the baby Jesus, and I believe he is handsome and lives in the sky with his pet cow. I believe that it is essential the cow like you, and if you pet the cow with your mind, it will lick your hand and give you cash. But if you make the cow angry, it will turn away from you, forget you exist, and your life will fall into shambles. I believe that as long as the cow likes you, you can get what you want. In order to keep the cow’s favor, you need to ‘let go and let God,’ meaning you can’t obsess about controlling every little thing. You have to let things unfold naturally, and not try to change things you cannot change. On the other hand, I believe that if you’ve made the cow happy by living this way, you’re allowed to ask for favors...”
― Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking

“You have survived everything you have been through, and you will survive this too. Stay for the person you will become. You are more than a bad day, or week, or month, or year, or even a decade. You are a future of multifarious possibility. You are another self at a point in future time looking back in gratitude that this lost and former you held on. Stay.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“You don’t have to be positive. You don’t have to feel guilty about fear or sadness or anger. You don’t stop the rain by telling it to stop. Sometimes you just have to let it pour, let it soak you to your skin. It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“There are four things that lead to wisdom. You ready for them?'
She nodded, wondering when the police work would begin.
"They are four sentences we learn to say, and mean." Gamache held up his hand as a fist and raised a finger with each point. "I don't know. I need help. I'm sorry. I was wrong'.”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?”
― Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace