Robin > Robin's Quotes

“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.”
― Niall Ferguson

“You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."

("The Castle")”
― Michael Connelly

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
― Kage Baker

“Don't imagine she trembles over the dissecting table either, Smith. She has nerves of ice. Real Good can be as ruthless as Evil when it wants to accomplish something, let me tell you.”
― Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World

“Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping."

"That's too easy," he said.

"On the contrary. It's monumentally difficult.”
― Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness

“Everything in our lives," she said quietly, "leads to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you--as you are right now and as you ever will be--are fully enough for this moment . . . ”
― Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“He'd pull a door off its hinges rather than work out how to turn a key.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Cocaine Blues

“We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.”
― Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf: The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves

“Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.”
― Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf: The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves

“When cops are on the job they love lawyers like lions love hyenas, only minus the mutual respect.”
― Reed Farrel Coleman, The James Deans

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]”
― Barbara Tuchman

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
― Barbara Tuchman

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”
― Barbara Tuchman

“Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”
― John Quincy Adams

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray