Freya > Freya's Quotes

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary. ”
― Wilhelm Reich

“People with no experience of life except under communist regimes would tell me that they knew—though they were unsure how—that their life was not ‘natural,’ just as Winston Smith concludes that life in Airstrip One (the new name for England in 1984) was unnatural. Other ways of life might have their problems, my Albanian and Rumanian friends would say, but theirs was unique in its violation of human nature. Orwell’s imaginative grasp of what it was like to live under communism seemed to them, as it does to me, to amount to genius.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
― Atwood H. Townsend

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“At the time when St. Francis impulsively gave his fine clothes to a beggar, nobody seems to have been very interested in what happened to the beggar. Was he rehabilitated? Did he open a small business? Or was he to be found the next day, naked again, in an Assisi gutter, having traded the clothes for a flagon of Orvieto?”
― William Voegeli, The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion

“I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential : Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”
― Peter Hitchens

“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Use a condom. The world doesn't need another you.”
― Carroll Bryant

“More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to justify or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there's anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist