S L > S's Quotes

“I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.”
― Roald Dahl, Boy and Going Solo

“I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.”
― Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

“Finding great talent, looking after staff and nurturing their talent is what we learned to do well. Losing good people is symptomatic of only one thing: truly crap, appalling and abysmal management.”
― Gordon Ramsay, Gordon Ramsay’s Playing with Fire: The no-holds-barred autobiography of the star chef

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Human beings are created unequal, and no amount of social engineering or government intervention can significantly alter one’s lot in life. At most, government policies can help equalise opportunity at the starting point, but they cannot ensure equal outcomes. Society is bound to end up with unequal outcomes”
― Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Thus, as I review the list of my friends and acquaintances, most of them emerge as stained with maniac stigmata of one sort or another. I begin to feel considerably reassured. The truth may simply be that human society is no more than a massing of lunatics.”
― Sōseki Natsume, I Am a Cat

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving. Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“The main rationale for the "elimination of politics' is also its main tool: rapid and broad-based economic development, in PAP thinking, both justifies as well as facilitates depoliticization. Behind this approach is the assumption that sound economic management can largely do away with political conflict. Whatever little friction that remains, the theory goes, can be sandpapered down with authoritarian methods that are not so course as to provoke widespread dissent. Then, the main political tasks that remain would be to boost citizens' trust in the long-term wisdom of programmes that may entail short-term pain, and to enhance the sensation of nationhood and mobilise them towards national goals”
― Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000

“You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Intelligence can also be broken down in terms of the skills that constitute it. One theory breaks it down into three separate skills: language ability, the speed and ability to perceive the world accurately, and the ability to manipulate spatial images in one’s head. Another theory goes even further, arguing that there are eight distinct dimensions that underlie intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalist, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Generally speaking, the apparent lack of argumentation in some traditional Chinese texts doesn't mean that they don't contain argumentation. Rather, they may have simply skipped many argumentation steps and offered instead an 'argumentation sketch', or the key and most difficult steps in an argumentation. In fact, even in works of physics and mathematics that are known for their rigor, argumentation steps are often skipped, and the failure of a reader to understand them if often not a sign of a lack of rigor of the works in question but the lack of the reader's competence in becoming a good physicist or mathematician. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in his discussion of the beauty of the aphoristic style, 'In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks - and those who are addressed, tall and lofty' (1954, 40 [ part 1, sec. 7,'On Reading and Writing']).”
― Tongdong Bai, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case

“Machiavelli asks “whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?” He answers that “one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind

“I wanted a taste of many different lives, sophisticated or simple, highbrow or low. Only then would this journey be worthwhile. (Although perhaps a life plain as porridge would never be an option for me.)”
― Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There is a deeply held grievance; resentment at the inability to win their case by legal means or total alienation from a political system that offers no redress; and finally, a resort to very public violence to coerce the enemy to change its policy.”
― John Hughes-Wilson, The Secret State

“Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them.”
― Shaun Usher, Letters of Note: Volume 1: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience

“I’m being rowed out to attend to a patient, for whom I shall feign practical confidence, even as I wander, bewildered in the great mystery of this earthly place, because each poor soul I encounter, I’ve come to know, is also my own. The lifelong accumulation of their hours; their betrayals, blindness, and failings; their genius and heart: mine, too. I shall come to God through their eyes.”
― Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Bangkok Wakes to Rain