Claude > Claude's Quotes

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
― Joseph Stalin

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Whoever controls the king, controls the kingdom”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“I sometimes think that 'friend' is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.”
― Scott Lynch, Rogues

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

“If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.”
― Malcom X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
― John Steinbeck

“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.”
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

“When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”
― Euripides, Orestes

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“You gain power by pretending to be weak.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind”
― Jim Morrison

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Your law always does more harm than crime, and your morality is a form of violence.”
― Edward Bond, Lear

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
― Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider

“It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky