Travis > Travis's Quotes

“There is no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
― Thomas Paine

“Soon earth will cover us all. Then in time earth, too, will change; later, what issues from this change will itself in turn incessantly change, and so again will all that then takes its place, even unto the world's end. to let the mind dwell on these swiftly rolling billows of change and transformation is to know a contempt for all things mortal.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!”
― David Sedaris , Me Talk Pretty One Day

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. ”
― Crimethinc, Expect Resistance: A Field Manual

“I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don’t really feel clever and don’t want to be clever. To sneak around and
make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who
are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer? The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for
one little insignificant tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in
it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this
rotten majority? I don’t feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all
the world thinks they are right? Let’s not think about it. Let’s crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger. There, and there!”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Hate can destroy you or it can fuel you. I knew I had to find a way for it to fuel me.” Krzyzewski”
― John Feinstein, The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry

“My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. Because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.”
― Mike Krzyzewski, Leading with the Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life

“Don’t worry about losing. Think about winning.” – Mike Krzyzewski, 5-Time National Champion Basketball Coach”
― Darrin Donnelly, The Turnaround: How to Build Life-Changing Confidence

“you should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do the right thing.” To”
― John Feinstein, The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry

“Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting--or even demanding--their own enslavement.”
― Larken Rose

“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.”
― Lysander Spooner

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

“Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”
― Gustave de Molinari