Madilyn > Madilyn's Quotes

“I'm a cynical idealist.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.”
― Mark Twain

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
― Thomas Mann, This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
― Howard Zinn

“If we don't end war, war will end us.”
― H.G. Wells

“Love is like war, except without all the blood and death and stuff.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation.”
― James Freeman Clarke

“A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.  Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.”
― Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness

“Boys are idiots.

Girls are idiots, too, of course, but boys are a special kind of idiot.

A girl, for instance, will vote for a boy in an election, or go to a movie that's about a boy, or buy a book that features a boy hero (or villain). Boys are much less likely to return the favor. They can't wrap their feeble minds around the idea that this girl might have anything in common with them. It's like they can't recognize girls as human beings.”
― Josh Lieb, I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President

“The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”
― Will Rogers

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“The venn diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle.”
― John Green

“But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise