Paulo Jorge > Paulo's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

“What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every culture has a maxim that makes this point, while nowhere in the Universe is there a single gravestone that reads 'He Loved Everything About His Life, Especially the Dying Bit at the End'.”
― Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

“The Hitchhiker's Guide is a hundred percent accurate. Reality, however, is not as reliable.”
― Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

“Miss me? Bet you did ... so would I.”
― Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingmen of all countries unite!”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars