gs3 > gs3's Quotes

“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”
― John Hersey, Hiroshima

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Happy people have neither age nor memory, they have no need of the past.”
― Tahar Djaout, L'invention Du Desert

“Liberty which is paraded in the West as a holy grail to keep the masses quiet, descends on their necks as a rubber truncheon when they organise to demand their real liberties, their basic rights to work, to land, to a secure future. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world today who have decided that liberty is something to do with everyday life and work. They are not interested in a liberty of the press to promote religious and racial hatreds; not interested in a liberty for publishers to flood bookstalls with pornographic literature; not interested in the liberty of scientists to devote their best brains to inventing hydrogen bombs or other means of destroying the world; not interested even in the theoretical liberty of the ballot box to decide between two groups of political parties both bent on maintaining the privileges of one tiny group of people over the great majority of the population.
If the same advance is made in the next twenty years as has been made in the past five years in bringing real liberties to the workers and peasants of the People's Democracies, and if the Western powers give up their morbid plans to destroy the People's Democracies by force of arms and the hydrogen bomb, the whole population will be enjoying liberties of a quality not yet dreamed of in the Western world.
[From Chapter 16 of People's Democracies (World Unity Publications, 1951), pp. 277-287.]”
― Wilfred G. Burchett, Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”
― Daniel Dennett

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time sixty years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me.”
― Tom Waits

“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”
― Philipp Meyer, American Rust

“No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho