Carlos > Carlos's Quotes

“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it”
― Eric Ambler, Dirty Story

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
― Schopenhauer

“Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“['non-white' gay men] are run over at the intersection of racism and homophobia”
― Eric C. Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“We make our purpose.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“It is my ambition as a Dichter to maintain, for a small number of people who may happen to understand me and be accessible to my influence, a transcendent life, or at least the desire for it, in the midst of the money-and-war-culture which the world has become.”
― Hermann Hesse

“A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new”
― Hermann Hesse, Knulp

“The only real recourse that [Russian] people had against tsarist rule was violence and rebellion. It was once remarked that Russia's constitution was "absolutism moderated by assassination.”
― Alan Beattie, False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World

“Don't Tase Me Bro!
If I'm a cop, and I'm a brotha, and they let me have a taser? Sorry bro, I'm tasing you.”
― Larry Wilmore, I'd Rather We Got Casinos: And Other Black Thoughts

“This [for opposition leaders to claim royal lineage], in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“No one ever asks what causes heterosexuality because no one is interested in stopping it”
― Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

“It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.”
― Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

“America's obsession with defining homosexuality by its third syllable contrasts sharply with more human exercises from Europe.”
― Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

“The root of heterosexual fear of male homosexuality is in the fact that anyone might be gay. Straight men aren't threatened by a flamboyant faggot because they know they aren't like that; they're threatened by a guy who's just like they are who turns out to be queer.”
― Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

“You can’t plead tolerance for gays by saying that they’re just like everyone else. Tolerance is something we should extend to people who are not like everyone else.”
― Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

“[If we extrapolate the United States population down to a 100-people village]This village that you inhabit has 14 illiterate members and 27 who have a college education; 5 of the villagers earn a third of the village’s entire income, while 6 of them earn less than .3 percent of it; 40 of them think and hope your village is headed towards a biblical end-times Armageddon; and 7 of them own a Britney Spears album.”
― Jack Bowen, If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?”
― Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread ...”
― Thomas Seward

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
― George Orwell

“... and in the homosexual phase which would follow Eurydice's death ... Orpheus sings no more, he writes.”
― Jacques Derrida

“The erotic economy of homosexual relations continues to be traced for our culture in the enduring equation of homosexuality with male homosexuality, of male homosexuality with sodomy, and of sodomy with anal intercourse, and, in particular, with the so-called “passive” or receptive position in anal intercourse.”
― Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory