Scott > Scott's Quotes

“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
― Michael Crichton

“They didn't understand what they were doing.
I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.”
― Michael Crichton, Prey

“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
― Richard Feynman

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“All religions are true but none are literal.”
― Joseph Campbell

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
― Winston Churchill

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
― Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
― George Lucas Star Wars

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.”
― Michael Crichton, Sphere

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”
― Winston Churchill

“Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“Even if you don’t believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed;
and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)