Talal > Talal's Quotes

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― William Arthur Ward

“Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O'Brien: You do not exist.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

“The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Big tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks. But because of all the wrinkles, they weren't dripping off. They spread out and ran together again, leaving a watery film over his ruined face. ”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.”
― Edwin Herbert Land

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.”
           
-I did nothing for you.”
           
-You loved me and your love made me--human.”
― Isaac Asimov, Forward the Foundation

“Sanity is not statistical.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones