Joss Ratcliffe > Joss's Quotes

“You take your natural vices and call them virtues. Of which greed is the most despicable. That and betrayal of commonality. After all, whoever decided that competition is always and without exception a healthy attribute? Why that particular path to self-esteem? Your heel on the hand of the one below. This is worth something? Let me tell you, it’s worth nothing. Nothing lasting. Every monument that exists beyond the moment—no matter which king, emperor or warrior lays claim to it—is actually a testament to the common, to co-operation, to the plural rather than the singular.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Двести лет вместе

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing happened for four centuries except a slow ageing among withered laurels and purifying swamps.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. "It's nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry" he would say. "I've been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.”
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“...and sank into the profound slumber which comes only to such
fortunate folk as are troubled neither with mosquitoes nor fleas nor excessive activity of brain.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”
― Gogol Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“So here we are once more in the wilds, and once more we've come upon some out of the way corner. But what a wilderness, and what an out of the way corner!”
― Gogol Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“And so the money which to some extent may have saved the situation is spent on various means for bringing about self oblivion”
― Gogol Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“There is no craftsman who has acquired full mastery”
― Ptahhotep, The maxims of Ptah-hotep: Humankind's earliest wisdom literature

“Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity - and nothing more? Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an exorbitant price? Is it not mockery?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”
― Iain M. Banks

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward