H (no longer expecting notifications) Balikov > H (no longer expecting notifications) Balikov's Quotes

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Invading armies can be resisted, invading ideas cannot be.”
― Victor Hugo

“Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.”
― Gary Hamel

“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime
What do I care
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner
Honey, I'll be there”
― Bob Dylan

“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.”
― Jane Jacobs

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“It's (Politics) rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But it's the only sport for grownups.”
― Robert Heinlein in Double Star

“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The first six million years had been all fun and games.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”
― George Carlin

“I read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager lived down in Greenwich Village and they all had those black clothes. The Jules Feiffer women with the black leather bags and the blonde hair and the silver earrings and they all had read Proust and Kafka and Nietzche. And so when I said, ‘No, the only thing I’ve ever read were two books by Mickey Spillane,’ they would look at their watch and I was out. So in order to be able to carry on a conversation with these women who I thought were so beautiful and fascinating, I had to read. So I read. But it wasn’t something I did out of love. I did it out of lust.”
― Woody Allen

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.”
― Elizabeth Goudge

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters,”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.”
― John Wayne

“My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Some days 'staying put' might feel the same as Going Nowhere.
Make a cup of tea, and wait for that feeling to pass.”
― Vivian Swift, When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Beware the man of one book.”
― Latin proverb

“One of the plagues of our day is that it's easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of massive violence, poverty and injustice around the globe...One of the greatest needs in this country is for us to have some hope, and to feel empowered that as ordinary people we can make a difference.”
― David Hartsough, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist

“Fairness is what justice really is.”
― Justice Potter Stewart

“To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity--be it art, music, literature, or science--is the way it enriches our lives.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss

“People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”
― Steve Perry, Men in Black