Christopher McMahon > Christopher's Quotes

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
― Edward W. Said

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.”
― Edward Said

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened, than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true.”
― Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“The descent into Hell is easy”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
― Thomas Hobbes

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
― Mao Tse-tung

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”
― Frank Sinatra

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“All was forgiven.

All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“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

“Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.”
― Terry Pratchett

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.

They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Texts are not finished objects.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
― Slavoj Zizek

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”
― Paul Virilio

“The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”
― Paul Virilio