Ben > Ben's Quotes

“..the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“It is easy to kill with a bow, girl. How easy it is to release the bowstring and think, it is not I, it is the arrow. The blood of that boy is not on my hands. The arrow killed him, not I. But the arrow does not dream anything in the night.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Miecz przeznaczenia

“Daniel, he said. I would have you follow me.

Master!....I will fight for you to the end!.

My loyal friend, he said, I would ask something much harder than that. Would you love for me to the end?

...I don't understand, he said again, You tell people about the kingdom. Are we not to fight for it?

The kingdom is only bought at a great price, Jesus said. There was one who came just yesterday and wanted to follow me. He was very rich, and when I asked him to give up his wealth, he went away.

I will give you everything I have!

....Riches are not keeping you from the kingdom, he said. You must give up your hate.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Bronze Bow

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“It is the hate that is the enemy. Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Bronze Bow

“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“the demons that make a person afraid are the hardest to cast out.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Bronze Bow

“You’ve mistaken the stars reflected on the surface of the lake at night for the heavens.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Blood of Elves

“A constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I suppose a cry does us all good at times-clears the air as other rain does.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“There are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. ... They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general - and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to [Hannah] Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology - it was their home, and it felt ordinary.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“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

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“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

“The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Time will absorb all the horror and grief into oblivion—as it did with so many wars and battles that had visited this land before.”
― Illia Ponomarenko, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv