David Ellis > David's Quotes

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
― Voltaire

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I'll show you an exceptional man." "show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I'd like to know
what this whole show
is all about
before it's out.”
― Piet Hein, Grooks 1

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“I feel horrible. She doesn't
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that's just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

“It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all? Pierre asked himself. "No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:
To-morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.”
― John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe

“The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“There is no such thing as a society and there never was. It was just you, me and the others all along. There is no we. There is no ours. There are only individuals with different amounts of influence on other individuals. Only an individual can make a decision. Only an individual can claim ownership.”
― Knut Svanholm, Bitcoin: Independence Reimagined

“Nobody could have ever conceived of a more absurd waste of human resources than to dig gold in distant corners of the Earth for the sole purpose of transporting it and reburying it immediately afterward in other deep holes, especially excavated to receive it and heavily guarded to protect it. The history of human intuitions, however, has a logic of its own.”
― Nik Bhatia, Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies

“The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. ”
― Thomas Szasz

“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“In the original fertilized egg, for instance, certain chemicals congregate at one end of the cell, others at the other end. When such a polarized cell divides, the two daughter cells receive different chemical allocations. This means that different genes will be read in the two daughter cells, and a kind of self-reinforcing divergence gets going.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The smart thing to do would have been to encourage experimentation with different strategies around the world and even within regions of individual countries. More experiments would mean more to be learned from both the successes and the failures. Incredibly, governments and health scientists frequently did the opposite, which was to disparage the policies of others rather than encourage them and pay attention to the outcomes.”
― Paul Frijters, The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next

“What life is, we know not. What life does, we know well.”
― Lord Perceval

“Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

“Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“Are you craving and partaking of something that affords you temporary relief or pleasure, inviting or incurring negative consequences but not giving it up? Welcome to the meeting. Free coffee in the back.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“While we rail on each other over whether a term is offensive, Blackrock is buying up all the houses292 and Monsanto is buying all the farms, and soon enough we can’t afford to live in a house or buy groceries.”
― Kaleb Gorman, Psychwars: Self-Defence Against Psyops, Propaganda, and Mind Control

“By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this --
One of you is lying.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“AWe are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
― W. Somerset Maugham