Ev > Ev's Quotes

“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“It goes without saying that the artists sympathised not with the actual working classes but with their own idea of the working classes,”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“People with no experience of life except under communist regimes would tell me that they knew—though they were unsure how—that their life was not ‘natural,’ just as Winston Smith concludes that life in Airstrip One (the new name for England in 1984) was unnatural. Other ways of life might have their problems, my Albanian and Rumanian friends would say, but theirs was unique in its violation of human nature. Orwell’s imaginative grasp of what it was like to live under communism seemed to them, as it does to me, to amount to genius.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. ”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
― John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867

“Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.”
― Euripides, Medea and Other Plays

“The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,
Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.”
― Euripides, Medea and Other Plays

“I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
― Euripides

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“May God have mercy for my enemies because I won't.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
― Joan of Arc

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“By living in a spirit of forgiveness we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom, it comes from sacrifice. That is the message of the Christian religion and it is the message that is conveyed by all the memorable works of our culture. It is the message that has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but which it seems to me can be heard once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the christian tradition the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices vengeance and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another.”
― Roger Scruton

“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”
― Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy

“Acquire knowledge, it enables its professor to distinguish right from wrong; it lights the way to heaven. It is our friend in the desert, our company in solitude and companion when friendless. It guides us to happiness, it sustains us in misery, it is an ornament amongst friends and an armour against enemies.”
― Prophet Mohammad s.a.w, القرآن الكريم

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”
― William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
― Douglas MacArthur