Christopher Lee Nelson > Christopher's Quotes

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“Never confuse movement with action.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.”
― Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists

“For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“O lost,
And by the wind grieved,
Ghost,
Come back again.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”
― Jack Kerouac

“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― James Baldwin

“I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home.”
― Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice: A Memoir

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
― James Baldwin

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”
― Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
― Thomas Wolfe, God's Lonely Man

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.”
― Nelson Algren

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.”
― Nelson Algren