Mo Hassan > Mo's Quotes

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
― Isaac Newton

“When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.”
― Justine Larbalestier, Zombies Vs. Unicorns

“We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.”
― Michael Crichton, Prey

“All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are.”
― Alphonse Karr

“Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.”
― Ken Follett, Winter of the World

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile

“What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”
― S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep

“Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“Believe in human beings - not all are good, but deep down all can be. But that doesn't mean you need to hang around crappy people and try to turn them around.”
― Jonas Eriksson

“I am only human, although I regret it.”
― Mark Twain

“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”
― Andy Bernard

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who don't have it.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?”
― Anonymous

“No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for "Before Coffee.”
― Cherise Sinclair, Master of the Mountain

“I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds.”
― George Carlin

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”
― Arthur Miller

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
― George Carlin

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
― George Carlin

“That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
― George Carlin

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
― George Carlin

“We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet? . . . And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great. It's been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn't goin' anywhere, folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away. And we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.”
― George Carlin

“People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.'

If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.

They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.'

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings