Nikola > Nikola's Quotes

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
― Anonymous Greek Proverb

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.
You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis

“I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.”
― Bernard Beckett, Genesis

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.”
― Stephen King, The Mist

“The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.”
― Stephen King, The Mist

“Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

“The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior [to men] and always have been.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation.”
― Stanisław Lem, Return From the Stars

“I had noticed that I had no difficulty conversing with robots, because absolutely nothing surprised them. They were incapable of surprise. A very sensible quality.”
― Stanisław Lem, Return From the Stars

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984