Illinijohn > Illinijohn's Quotes

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola

“It seems to be difficult if not impossible for human beings to avoid thinking of government as mystical entity with a nature and a history all its own. It constitutes for them a creature somehow interposed between themselves and the great flow of cosmic events, and they look to it to think for them and to protect them. In democratic countries it is theoretically their agent, but there seems to be a strong tendency to convert the presumably free citizen into its agent, or at all events, its client. This exalted view of its scope, character, powers and autonomy is fundamentally false. A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men…. Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general, have come to a degree of puissance in the world that is unchallenged by that of any other group. Their fiats, however preposterous, are generally obeyed as a matter of duty, they are assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom, and the lives of multitudes are willingly sacrificed in their interest.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”
― Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings

“RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come”
― Victor Hugo

“Revolution - In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary and Other Works

“Whoever claims any right that he is unwilling to accord to his fellow-men is dishonest and infamous.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child

“How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?”
― William Blake

“One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“One becomes gradually accustomed to poison.”
― Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea

“Good ideas don’t stand a chance against good bureaucracy.”
― Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill

“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path thats clear. I will choose Freewill.”
― Neil Peart

“I'd rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.”
― Ben Franklin

“My shadow serves as the friend I crave.”
― Anna Akhmatova

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”
― Samuel Adams

“Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights - the right to swear and curse at your fate!”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Rudin

“If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken."

[on Twitter, July 17, 2012]”
― Scott Lynch

“The common good and the individual good rarely coincide.”
― Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch

“Oh, to be old again,” said the young corpse.”
― Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“FUTURE, n.
That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”
― Carl Von Clausewitz, On War: Volume 1