Kenton Battershell > Kenton's Quotes

“The world is whatever we make it. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
― Dennis K. Hausker, Evanshard Glade

“Hello, Jake, I'm glad you could come," Sunny (as Madame Hoo was now called) said, shaking the hand of the chairman of the State Gambling Commission.

"Boom!" Jake Wexler replied.”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

“Q: What are in your eyes the major defects in the West? A: The West has come to regard the values of freedom, the yardstick of human rights, as something Western. Many of them [westerns] specially in Europe take the values and the institutions on freedom, the institutions on science, curiosity, the individual, i mean, the rule of law and they’ve come to take that all for granted that they are not aware of the threat against it and not aware of the fact that you have to sustain it day by day as with all man made things. I mean, a building for example, the roof will leak, the paint will fall and you have to repaint it, you have to maintain it all the time it seems that people have forgotten that and perhaps part of the reason is because the generation that is now enjoying all the freedoms in the West is not the generations that built it; these are generations that inherited and like companies, family companies, often you’ll see the first generation or the second generation are almost always more passionate about the brand and the family company and name and keeping it all int he family and then the third generation live, use, take the money and they are either overtaken by bigger companies, swallowed up or they go bankrupt and I think there is an analogy there in that the generations after the second world war living today in Europe, United States may be different but I’m here much too short to say anything about it, is that there are people who are so complacent, they’ve always been free, they just no longer know what it is that freedom costs and for me that would be making the big mistake and you can see it. The education system in Europe where history is no longer an obligatory subject, science is no longer an obligatory subject, school systems have become about, look at Holland, our country where they have allowed parents, in the name of freedom, to build their own schools that we now have schools founded on what the child wants so if the child wants to play all day long then that is an individual freedom of the child and so it’s up to the child to decide whether to do math or to clay and now in our country in Holland, in the name of freedom of education, the state pays for these schools and I was raving against muslim schools and i thought about this cuz i was like you know ok in muslin schools at least they learn to count.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“It's quite exciting," said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, A Study in Scarlet

“History is not was, it is.”
― Faulkner, William

“This demonstrated to me that those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee for good choices are under a complete illusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 1

“One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

“Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“Ellen Brody:
Wanna get drunk and fool around?

Brody:
Oh Yeah.”
― Peter Benchley

“The contents of Mr. Thorne's letter, as nearly as I can remember, were as follows: "I have seen your slave, Linda, and conversed with her. She can be taken very easily, if you manage prudently. There are enough of us here to swear to her identity as your property. I am a patriot, a lover of my country, and I do this as an act of justice to the laws.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“…the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.

While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“The night is dark, the lamps are all off, and the moon is new. But my inner eye sees the path. I follow my feet, and my feet follow my soul.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“At what point does faith become insanity?”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Used in combination with genomics, AI could help pharma companies to develop new drugs for rare diseases. The rarer a disease is, the smaller the market is and so the less likely it is to have been addressed. Big pharma is hesitant to take on the high development costs for new drugs if there’s no sign of a return on investment. Biological processes are complex, and that means that they lead to multidimensional data that human beings struggle to wrap their heads around. The good news is that AI is the perfect tool to spot patterns in this kind of data.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“It was amazing how a crisis could concentrate some minds while others went to pieces. Things had gone disastrously wrong in the last few days for Adam. His only worry before finding the book had been how to keep his girlfriend Linda without marrying her in the process. A contest he had lost.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“It was for the purpose of restoring intimate fellowship with mankind that Jesus came.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“Sir, I think you need to read this,’ he said, nervously handing over the mainframe’s dissertation of its own wellbeing.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Tightening his embrace around his wife and little Theo, he vowed, "I will do everything in my power to continue being worthy of the faith you have in me.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“But intellect does not inform matters of the heart. Regrets”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss

“It scarcely made a column of newspaper space, but it wrote headlines in their lives.”
― Erich Segal, Prizes

“I know what it means to be moved by a book in my body so much that I go looking for its analog in the real world.

[From an interview with Complex magazine, 12/2012]”
― Junot Díaz

“She could feel the frigid city’s misery flooding the space where her heart used to be.”
― Jana Petken, The Man from Section Five: A Brinley Knight Spy Thriller

“As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. [...] It's sheer wish fulfillment. War... is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission....”
― Anthony Burgess, 1985

“If the Agency could become a container for something neither Anna nor Mary had known before: a family. Now, without Caroline depending on her, Anna was alone. It did not taste good. There were voices inside: I am risking everything; I could lose everything.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Every night I dream a lot. Every day I live a little.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“Blackness. Nothingness. It was in the shape of a giant, hazy shadow, enveloping me, swallowing me, and digesting me into the unknown. It was my biggest fear and my ultimate fate.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“Nella vita le sventure ci colgono di sorpresa, spesso con violenza, proprio come l'amore.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative".”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Son, that's a pretty hard question to answer. But I do believe that any wish you make can come true if you help the wish. I don't think that the Lord meant for our lives to be so simple and easy that every time we wanted something, all we had to do was wish for it and we'd get it. I don't believe that at all. If that were true, there would be a lot of lazy people in this old world. No one would be working. Everyone would be wishing for what they needed or wanted.
"Papa," I asked, "how can you help a wish?"
"Oh, there are a lot of ways," Papa said. "Hard work, faith, patience, and determination. I think prayer and really believing in your wish can help more than anything else.”
― Wilson Rawls, Summer of the Monkeys