Ziggy > Ziggy's Quotes

“You simply can't trust the British. With Americans (or Canadians, for that matter) what you see is what you get. But settle into your seat on a 749 flying out of Heathrow next to an ostensibly boring old Englishman with wobbly chins, the acquired stammer, obviously something in the City, intent on his Times crossword puzzle, and don't you dare patronize him. Mr. Milquetoast, actually a judo black belt, was probably parachuted into the Dordogne in 1943, blew up a train or two, and survived the Gestapo cells by concentrating on what would become the definitive translation of Gilgamesh from the Sin-Leqi-Inninni; and now -- his garment bag stuffed with his wife's most alluring cocktail dresses and lingerie -- he is no doubt bound for the annual convention of cross-dressers in Saskatoon.”
― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version

“I am an impenitent rotter to this day, a malevolent man, exulting in the transgressions of my betters.”
― Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”
― Samuel Johnson

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“So rapid an understanding can almost be called a form of stupidity, of not even trying really to understand.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.”
― Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars

“Many commit the same crime with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown.”
― Juvenal, The Satires

“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
― Petronius Arbiter

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead