Robert Kettering > Robert's Quotes

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.”
― William Goldman

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
― Jack London

“Shut up,' he explained.”
― Ring Lardner

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
― Ring Lardner

“Although he is a very poor fielder, he is a very poor hitter.”
― Ring Lardner

“Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty”
― Ring Lardner

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Doom. You recognize Doom easily. It's a feeling and a taste, and it's black, and it's very heavy. It comes down over your head, and wraps tentacles around you, and sinks long dirty fingernails into your heart. It has a stink of burning garbage.”
― Gil Brewer, The Vengeful Virgin

“Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.”
― Philip Larkin

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

“I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.”
― Michael Faudet

“The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

“No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

“President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word “Islam” and simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of the jihadist few.

I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so petrified of Voldemort’s evil that they do two things: They refuse to call Voldemort by name, instead referring to “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and they deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort’s power.

The same hysteria about Islamism is unfolding before our eyes. But no strategy intended to defeat Islamism can succeed if Islamism itself and its violent expression in jihadism are not first named, isolated and understood.

From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015.”
― Maajid Nawaz

“One does not need to be brown to discuss racism, one does not need to be Muslim to discuss Islam. Ideas have no color, or country. Good ideas are truly universal. Any attempt to police ideas, to quarantine thought based on race or religion, and to pre-define what is and what isn’t a legitimate conversation, must be resisted by all.”
― Maajid Nawaz

“We disguised our political demands behind religion and multiculturalism, and deliberately labeled any objection to our demands as racism. Even worse, we did this to the very generation who had been socialist sympathizers in their youth, people sympathetic to charges of racism, who like Dave Gomer were now in middle-career management posts. It is no wonder then that the authorities were unprepared to deal with politicized religion as ideological agitation; they felt racist if they tried to stop us.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

“Like so many nice people who seek power, I wanted to force everyone else to be nice. It's called totalitarianism.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism

“Unlike the student protests in the 1960s, by using religion and multiculturalism as a cover, we brought an entirely foreign lexicon to the table. We knowingly presented political demands disguised as religion and multiculturalism, and deliberately labelled any objection to our demands as racism and bigotry. Even worse, we did this to the very generation who had been socialist sympathisers in their youth, people sympathetic to charges of racism, who were now in middle-career management posts; people like Dave Gomer. It is no wonder then that the authorities were unprepared to deal with politicised religion as ideological agitation, and felt racist if they tried to stop us.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism

“Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Time for Everything

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein