Luis Guimarães > Luis's Quotes

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Technology implies belligerence.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Insanity is contagious.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Every writer I know has trouble writing. ”
― Joseph Heller

“mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.”
― Joseph Heller

“-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.”
― Joseph Heller, Good as Gold

“Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.”
― Mike Royko

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.”
― Glen Cook, Shadow Games

“Life is serious but art is fun!”
― John Irving

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Unless I’m at a wedding, I don’t like veiled threats.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.”
― Alain de Botton

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.”
― T.H. White, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me

“Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.”
― Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing

“Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating
conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“Better not to find out whether or not the rumors
are true, I say. Better find the other bastard and skin
him.”
― Angelo Tsanatelis, The Shadow & the Blood Assassin

“Find the one thing you love and shut up about it.”
― Karen Kilgariff

“Sarcasm is a manifestation of anger, and anger can make you the puppet of your opponents.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman, Kaya Abaniah and the Father of the Forest

“He who is a useful keeper of anything is also a better thief.”
― Plato

“Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.”
― Edith Hamilton