Violette Strotz > Violette's Quotes

“Perhaps this sort of marriage, at the top echelons of Washington and international society, was made from different rules. Fidelity, honesty – perhaps these were quaint ideas better suited to less ambitious people. When one had the heights of the free world practically in one’s grasp, maybe the bargain at the altar became more pragmatic.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives

“I was able to shake off the near-death experience, and whether it was true or not, I was able to use it as some sort of moral validation as to the importance of my existence, or at least the importance of me completing this job, because clearly God, the universe or whoever understood that there was no other human being alive on this earth stupid enough to take this job.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“You realize, of course, the Omegans nearly lost this Earth. They
had everything yet let it disintegrate through their rampant carelessness.
Two hundred years past they possessed the rudimentary beginnings
of the NET to bring them together. They called it the Internet.
Yet they treated it like a toy, tribalized themselves, and thus nearly lost
the planet.
“Nationalist wars, self serving ideologies, competing religions . . .
more significant, though not to the Omegans, was climate change
itself, which mattered more than any petty dogma, but they ignored
it until too late. It has ultimately determined our lives, managed now
by the CORPORATE, using the only possible tools to survive. There
were billions of Humans then. There is now but a fraction of that:
some 300 million we know in the MEGS and, of course, the uncounted
MASSes.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“Amanda, still thinking more about Harry Mize than the issues before the committee, lunged forward and snatched the note from Kershing’s hand. After reading it, she stood up and walked out of the hearing, leaving the receipt on her chair. Rick glanced up as she walked out. Then, he picked up his receipt and read Kershing’s words. Get the trucks in position. It’s time to go.”
― Chad Boudreaux, Scavenger Hunt

“Without active listening, you can not adequately contribute to civil discourse.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“No one knew more than he how fast life could change. He pulled a trigger and four seconds later the life of a man a thousand meters away was over.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“He glanced at Sally. She sat on the edge, her feet dangling over the two-hundred-foot drop, just like he’d done all those years ago, secretly hoping his parents would tell him to come back, that it was dangerous. They never even got out of the car.”
― Barry Kirwan, When the children come

“What the hell, if you are going to roll the dice with Lucifer, I say go the distance.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.”
― Thomas Mann

“The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech”
― T.S. Eliot