RR > RR's Quotes

“Visibility is a trap.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“A democracy cannot rule an empire. Neither can one man, though empire may appear to presuppose monarchy. There is always an oligarchy somewhere, open or concealed.”
― Ronald Syme

“Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie.

Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology-for that applies only to a developed man-but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.”
― P.D. Ouspensky

“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

“I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“Thus it is said:
The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest are seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.

The Tao is nowhere to be found.
Yet it nourishes and completes all things.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.”
― C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings

“For millions of people, “wealth” amounts to little more than a few weeks’ wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities. That is why it is so essential to study capital and its distribution in a methodical, systematic way.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.”
― Gore Vidal, Burr

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.”
― I.F. Stone

“The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
― George W. Bush

“When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]”
― Cyril Connolly

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
― Gore Vidal

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies... is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
― Carroll Quigley

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

“I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!”
― William Gaddis, J R