Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.”
― Kevin Smith

“BRODIE:

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA.”
― Kevin Smith, Mallrats

“You're familiar with the theory of evolution?" asked Cabal.
"Sir?"
"They're about to find out why intelligence is a survival trait.”
― Jonathan L. Howard

“Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. “Smile when you whisper,” he advised her. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?”

She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. “Oh, sweetheart… somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?”

Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

“What?” he managed in a dry whisper.

“Smile when you whisper,” she said, her expression fixed and blood-curdlingly coquettish. You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?”

“Please don’t do that.”
― Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Detective

“As the barman’s hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d watched the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, rise from the depths of the Pacific.”
― Jonathan L. Howard

“To be fucking human, to not put too fine a point on it, and Daniel Boone can kiss my ass.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

“Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence. The question itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon for philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn with the wreckage of theories of consciousness. After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science – intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and, most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment.

Philosophers flourish in these various endeavors, but for the time being, at least, and by a process of elimination, the solution of the riddle has been left to science. What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step. (9-10)”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“For the entire course of evolution leading from our primitive mammalian forebears of a hundred million years ago to the single lineage that threaded its way to become the first Homo sapiens, the total number of individuals it required might have been one hundred billion. Unknowingly, they all lived and died for us. (21)”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“Overall, it seems now possible to draw a reasonably good explanation of why the human condition is a singularity, why the likes of it has occurred only once and took so long in coming. The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of the evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right. Each has required a particular sequence of one or more preadaptations that occurred previously. Homo sapiens is the only species of large mammal – thus large enough to evolve a human-sized brain – to have made every one of the required lucky turns in the evolutionary maze. (45)”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself. (254)”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“Humorists are precisely the kinds of guys who can cut through the orgy of petty indignation that the aging baby boomers are imposing on this great country.”
― David Brin

“We aren’t a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries . . . her ambition and her heart. Her voice. So sing. (556)”
― David Brin, Existence

“I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: “Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing.” The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time’s mystery and a man’s love of life.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he'd had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Donald Trump comes closer than anyone else to being the archetype of the species; crossing genres, he exemplifies all the ways an asshole can capture our attention.”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“Still, to paraphrase what John Stuart Mill said about the stupidity of the Tories, while not all people who claim to be politically incorrect are assholes, it's exactly the sort of thing an asshole is apt to say. (183)”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“It's not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say "I'm authentic," they're not evoking the shade of Neal Cassady. (102)”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“It's important that these people think of their adversaries specifically as assholes. That's what gives the modern rhetoric of polarization its singular stamp and makes it different from the execrations of other ages. Seeing our antagonists as assholes means, for one thing, that the enmity is personal. (189)”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“When Roger Ailes said that NPR executives were 'the left wing of Nazism," he wasn't trying to tar NPR as evil in the eyes of the general public or the Congress, but to signal to others on his team that they owed NPR no courtesy or respect and had permission to be assholes about the organization. (209-10)”
― Geoffrey Nunberg, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“Susan says, don't get afraid, get angry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“The man gave Dodger a cursory glance that had quite a lot of curse in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Dodger

“. . . had decided what to do, which was to smile like the morning sun with a knife in its teeth.”
― Terry Pratchett, Dodger