Steven Harbin > Steven's Quotes

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.”
― Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
― Billy Sunday, "Billy" Sunday, the man and his message: with his own words which have won thousands for Christ

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

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.”
― Robert Bloch

“Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just “evil” now. It’s completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”
― Tom Waits

“I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.”
― James Mitchner

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“Joy multiplies when it is shared among friends, but grief diminishes with every division. That is life.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Exile

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire

“Sane is boring.”
― R. A. Salvatore

“Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin

“As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. ”
― Charles de Lint

“Hell needed horribly bright, self-centered people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage”
― Terry Pratchett, Eric

“Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
― Howard Zinn

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.”
― Howard Zinn, Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice – A Revisionist Critique of American Ideology for Peace and Active Citizenship

“People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."

[Afterword]”
― Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.”
― Sarah Vowell

“I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.”
― Sarah Vowell

“I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water'... the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.”
― Sarah Vowell

“Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.”
― Sarah Vowell

“American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.”
― Sarah Vowell

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot