S. Baker > S.'s Quotes

“The key to writing is concentration, not inspiration. It requires deep attention to your characters, to the world they live in, and to the story you have to tell.”
― Salman Rushdie

“If you think fate is fickle, try tempting it”
― S. Spencer Baker, Slabscape: Reset

“Laughter is the antidote to existential pain”
― S. Spencer Baker, Slabscape: Reset

“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
― Woody Allen

“You are the man. You have to take your dignity and self respect to the pawnbrokers.”
― David Mitchell, Number9Dream

“mystery is not founded in ignorance, mystery is founded in imagination”
― S. Spencer Baker, Slabscape: Reset

“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.”
― Stephen Hawking

“In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum”
― Larry Niven, Ringworld

“There are only two types of women: goddesses and doormats.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
― Pablo Picasso

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. ”
― William Ralph Inge

“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The theory goes,’ continued Kiki, ‘that anyone is capable of being president, so anyone can be, except the people who really want to be, because the last person who should be given a position of power is someone who tries to convince people they should have it.”
― S. Spencer Baker, Reset

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
― Robert A. Heinlein