sharivar > sharivar's Quotes

“The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.”
― Glen Cook, Dreams of Steel

“More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.”
― Glen Cook, Dreams of Steel

“Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.”
― Glen Cook, The Black Company

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”
― Iain M. Banks

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
― Iain Banks

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage alone a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.

I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.”
― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters

“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

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.”
― Glen Cook, Shadow Games

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”
― Gene Wolfe

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.”
― Gene Wolfe

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.”
― Glen Cook, The White Rose

“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.”
― Daniel Dennett

“If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Has it ever occured to you, Master Ninefingers, that a sword is different from other weapons? Axes and maces and so forth are lethal enough, but they hang on the belt like dumb brutes. But a sword...a sword has a voice.
Sheathed it has little to say, to be sure, but you need only put your hand on the hilt and it begins to whisper in your enemy's ear. A gentle word. A word of caution. Do you hear it?
Now, compare it to the sword half drawn. It speaks louder, does it not? It hisses a dire threat. It makes a deadly promise. Do you hear it?
Now compare it to the sword full drawn. It shouts now, does it not? It screams defiance! It bellows a challenge! Do you hear it?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged

“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“You should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“The dead can forgive. The dead can be forgiven. The rest of us have better things to do. (Monza Murcatto)”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged