Gabriel Stanovsky > Gabriel's Quotes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A Heinlein

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“In this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci. (They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.)”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”
― Ronald H. Coase, Essays on Economics and Economists

“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.”
― Mark Twain

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

“Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“The medium is the message.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
― Pink Floyd

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.”
― Wilson Mizner

“But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”
― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.”
― Max Weinreich

“No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
― George Lucas, The Star Wars Trilogy

“As a student of business administration, I know that there is a law of evolution for organizations as stringent and inevitable as anything in life. The longer one exists, the more it grinds out restrictions that slow its own functions. It reaches entropy in a state of total narcissism. Only the people sufficiently far out in the field get anything done, and every time they do they are breaking half a dozen rules in the process.”
― Roger Zelazny, Doorways in the Sand

“The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
Will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will not be re-run, brothers.
The revolution will be live.”
― Gil Scott-Heron

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--”
― Emily Dickinson

“The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Everything popular is wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde