Arthur > Arthur's Quotes

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Even if we overlook animal welfare, can God be happy with the destruction of the planet He created? As animal farming is the number-one cause of deforestation, habitat loss and species extinction, the idea that God condones the practice seems contradictory.”
― Ed Winters, How to Argue With a Meat Eater

“People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
”
― Thomas Sowell

“The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied.

They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.”
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America

“However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”
― Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists”
― Thomas Sowell

“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

“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.”
― Andy Warhol

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.”
― Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: In His Own Words

“Art is what you can get away with.”
― Andy Warhol

“As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.”
― Andy Warhol

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.”
― Andy Warhol

“The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting”
― Andy Warhol

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”
― Andy Warhol

“I never fall apart, because I never fall together.”
― Andy Warhol

“I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”
― Andy Warhol

“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
― Andy Warhol

“I like to be the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place. Being the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it because something interesting always happens.”
― Andy Warhol

“I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.”
― Andy Warhol

“I like boring things.”
― Andy Warhol

“I'm not afraid to die; I just don't want to be there when it happens”
― Andy Warhol

“One of the easiest ways to do this is to be mindful of how we use words like ‘you’ and ‘your’. During a conversation with a meat eater called Cam, he declared that he ‘definitely loves animals’. I could have said, ‘Proclaiming that you love animals while still eating meat means you’re a hypocrite,’ but I instead said, ‘Can you love them if you pay for them to be killed needlessly?’ In response he smiled knowingly and said, ‘See, that’s a good question.”
― Ed Winters, How to Argue With a Meat Eater

“Kyle: I believe as people that we are above animals.
Me: Are you above a horse?
Kyle: Yes.
Me: So why not kill the horse then?
Kyle: Because I don’t have to.
Me: You don’t have to kill the cows or chickens or pigs either.
Kyle: To fulfil what I feel I need from my diet I do.
Me: Need or want?
Kyle: Yeah, that’s fair.
Me: Is it a need or a want?
Kyle: I guess you’re right.”
― Ed Winters, How to Argue With a Meat Eater