“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”
Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist
Source: Running With Scissors
“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”
Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist
E. Lockhart book The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
“We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”
Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist
Closing words from his last speech, Vanderbilt University (April 1989).
Context: In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong … and we were right! I regret nothing!
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist
It is July 1959 and Hemingway is in Marceliano's bar in Pamplona, where he has not been since before the Spanish Civil War. In the following paragraph Hemingway mentions for contrast an unpleasant American journalist in his early twenties whose 'handsome young face already showed the traced lines of bitterness around the upper lips.'
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9
Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter
Launch.com, November 2, 2000<!-- site no longer exists -->
“Your eyes were filled with love, Kate Vane;
Ah, would that we were young again!”
Thomas Dunn English (1819–1902) American state and federal politician
Kate Vane, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).