Brendan Moran > Brendan's Quotes

“There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”
― Huey P. Newton

“We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come. ”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

“My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”
― Charles Bukowski, South of No North

“Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“--Why are we fighting them?
--They're mad. We're sane.
--How do we know?
--That we're sane?
--Yes.
--Am I sane?
--To all appearances.
--And you, do you consider yourself sane?
--I do.
--Well, there you have it.
--But don't they also consider themselves sane?
--I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane.
--How must that make them feel?
--Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.”
― Donald Barthelme

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It gives me strength to have somebody to fight for; I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”
― George Carlin

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
― Frank Zappa

“Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.”
― Darren Shan

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Every villain is a hero in his own mind.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Education is no substitute for intelligence.”
― Frank Herbert

“I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
― Plato, The Republic

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.”
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
― George Sand, Mauprat

“If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”
― Clifford Odets

“I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.”
― Roger Zelazny, Frost & Fire

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes