The Dude > The Dude's Quotes

“My mom is cool and my mom will treat you right.”
― Sam Hyde

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”
― Frank Zappa

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend.”
― Diogenes

“One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.”
― Diogenes Laërtius

“We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.”
― Diogenes Laertius

“We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.”
― Diogenes Laertius

“The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.”
― Oakley Hall, Warlock

“There is goоd reason to believe that primitive mаn suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern mаn is.”
― Ted Kacyzinski, The Unabomber's Manifesto

“The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!”
― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

“Nowadays, you can do anything that you want—anal, oral, fisting—but you need to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders & The Fisher of Men

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“You can tell a lot about a country which refers to the Royal Mint and the National Debt.”
― William Cobbett

“You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
What mood is that?
Last-minute panic.”
― Bill Watterson