TE > TE's Quotes

“Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions....Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.”
― Roger Scruton

“Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity's spiritual redemption.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“To offer toleration to those gripped by animosity to your way of life is to open the door to destruction.”
― Roger Scruton

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Plagiarism is the silliest of misdemeanors. What harm is there in writing what's already been written? Real originality is a capital crime, often calling for cruel and unusual punishment in advance of the coup de grâce.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I've heard a lot of bombs go off in my time, and they never impressed me much as a way to get things done.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“It's all I've seen, all I've been through...that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I've lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I was like almost everybody who came through that war... I got so I couldn't feel anything... Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or worse than any other. After we finished hanging Hoess... I packed up my clothes to go home. The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an hour I did the very same job-once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I felt the dust of the holy land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust-and-rubble blanket I would one day wear.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan

“The Gothic repeatedly stages moments of transgression because it is obsessed with establishing and policing borders, delineating strict categories of being. The enduring icons of the Gothic are entities that breach the absolute distinctions between life and death (ghosts, vampires, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein's creature) or between human and beast (werewolves and other animalistic regressions, the creatures spliced together by Dr. Moreau) or which threaten the integrity of the individual ego and the exercise of will by merging with another (Jeckyll and Hyde, the persecuting double, the Mesmerist who holds victims in his or her power). Ostensibly, conclusions reinstate fixed borders, re-secure autonomy, and destroy any intolerable occupants of these twilight zones.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“The most succssful monsters overdetermine these tansgressions to become, in Judith Halberstam's evocative phrase, 'technologies of monstrosity' that condense and process different and even contradictory anxieties about category and border. Some critics hold that the genre speaks to universal, primitive taboos about the very foundational elements of what it means to be human, yet the ebb and flow of the Gothic across the modern period invites more historical readings. Indeed, one of the princial border breaches in the Gothic is history itself- the insidious leakage of the pre-modern past into the skeptical, allegedly enlightened present. The Gothic, Robert Mighall suggests, can be thought of as a way of relating to the past and its legacies.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“We can think about this in fairly abstract ways: the ghost, for instance, is structurally a stubborn trace of the past that persists into the present and demands a historical understanding if it is to be laid to rest. Similarly, Sigmund Freud defined the feeling of the uncanny as the shiver of realizing that modern reason has merely repressed rather than replaced primitive superstition. 'All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officailly that the dead can become visible as spirits', yet Freud suspeccted that at times 'almost all of us think as savages do on this topic.' This return to pre-modern beliefs was itself the product of thinking of human subjectivity as a history of developmental layers that could be stripped away in an instant of dread, returning us to a 'savage' state.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Things that happen are of no importance. But from everything that happens, there is a lesson to be learned.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“If two generous paths branch from the highroad of life and only one can be followed, who is to judge which is best?”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“If all the dew were diamonds...we would be very rich. We would be drunk all our lives.”
― John Steinbeck

“The entire time I was in the camp it was as if I had a double personality. My real self seemed to be observing what was happening to my physical self.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“Listening to the voices of the Ravensbruck women I looked for clues about why this group survived. I could almost hear Maria Bielicka banging her fists on the table as she tried to explain why survival was in the blood of every Polish woman, 'passed on from mother to daughter. Jeannie Roussau… survived because she refused not to... she refused to make German arms... she refused to die on the freezing airfield and escaped back to the man camp, hiding in a typhus truck. When Bernadotte arrived, Jeannie was locked in the Strafblock but refused to be left behind, and persuaded the Blockova to let her out. 'You can refuse what is happening. Or go along with it. I was in the refusal camp,' she said. I asked her how she had the courage. 'I don't know. I was young. I thought if I do it, it will work. You simply cannot accept some things. Certain things.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

“You must be your own advocate... You can't rely solely on your doctors or you family or anyone else; you have to stay on top of your own care, no matter how sick or exhausted you feel. Learn everything you can about your disease and your diagnosis, locate the very best doctors, find out exactly what drugs and treatments your doctors are giving you and what they're supposed to do, never stop researching and asking questions, and check, check, check what the doctors tell you-get second and third opinions. All of this is up to you because ultimately no one else-not your family members who love you, or your doctors, who want you to survive-is responsible for your health. You need a support team, of course, but in the end, you run this race on your own.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery