“Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.”
Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) American writer
Source: The Game of Life and How to Play It
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVIII.
“Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.”
Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) American writer
Source: The Game of Life and How to Play It
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: At every moment of crisis an array of men risk their lives in the front ranks as standard-bearers of God to fight and take upon themselves the whole responsibility of the battle.
Once long ago it was the priests, the kings, the noblemen, or the burghers who created civilizations and set divinity free.
Today God is the common worker made savage by toil and rage and hunger
Larry Niven (1938) American writer
There Is a Tide (p. 206)
Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975)
Roman Polanski (1933) Polish-French film director, producer, writer, actor, and rapist
Polanski : His Life and Films (1982)
Context: People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously.
“Good in Crisis; Sucks at Normal.’ That about sums up my whole life, doesn’t it?”
Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist
Source: UnSouled
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 1, “God Save the King” (p. 40)
Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author
Source: John Maynard Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009), Ch. 1 : What Went Wrong?