Furji > Furji's Quotes

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

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.”
― Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

“I don't want to die without any scars.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.”
― Herbert Hoover

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
― Victor Hugo

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”
― Victor Hugo

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
― Victor Hugo

“A moral vision must be balanced by the realist dimension of prudence to have a reasonable prospect of success.”
― Joseph S. Nye Jr., Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

“History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.”
― Jeffrey Sachs

“We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

“There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

“The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire. Commodus, like a number of late-Roman emperors, and like Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. The Praetorian Guards assassinated Pertinax three months after he became emperor. The Guards then auctioned off his position to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted sixty-six days. There would be five emperors in AD 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“America was founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the myth of whiteness externalize evil—their own evil—onto their victims. Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by an inner loneliness and latent guilt.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Your future self is watching you right now through your memories.”
― Aubrey de Grey

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn