Rou > Rou's Quotes

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."
"My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,' I said, 'but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“People should be changed by world wars," I said, "else what are world wars for?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves–a nation of two.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night

“What can any one person do?' he said.
'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I found the words to kill the love, didn't I -" she said, "the love that couldn't be killed?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Tell me what to live for. Tell me what you live for, so I can live for it, too—here or ten thousand kilometers from here. Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I didn't really steal it. I just borrowed it for all eternity”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“We really haven’t talked anything over—” she said. “What is there to talk about?” I said. “Nothing you could say would make me love you more or less. Our love is too deep for words ever to touch it. It’s soul love.” She sighed. “How lovely that is—if it’s true.” She put her hands close together, but not touching. “Our souls in love.” “A love that can weather anything,” I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“How could I ever trust a man who's been as good a spy as you have?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“That made me hate you more. Happiness had no place in war”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Her punishment was to be made to feel like a fool. She had been given her opportunity to participate in civilization, and she had muffled it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“You can ask, but you surely know I won't tell you”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“He had committed no evil action, but, what was far worse than an evil action, he had entertained evil thoughts, whence evil actions proceed. An evil action may not be repeated, and can be repented of; but evil thoughts generate all evil actions. An evil action only smooths the path for other evil acts; evil thoughts uncontrollably drag one along that path.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection