“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”
Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor
Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)
“All the historical books which contain no lies are extremely tedious.”
Les livres d'histoire qui ne mentent pas sont tout fort maussades.
La Bûche [The Log] (December 24, 1849)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
Variant: History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
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Anatole France122
French writer 1844–1924Related quotes
John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law
as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.
“A book in which there were no lies would be a curiosity.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician
"Obituary: Tony Banks" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4591310.stm, BBC News, 9 January 2006. <br class="br">comments on constituency work after standing down as an MP
Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist
Source: Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), p. 149
“A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.”
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist
The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs
Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: Of writing that is filled with mechanical and grammatical error, as compared with writing that conforms to the rules of standard edited English. Surely, we do not want to say that there is a necessary correlation between mechanical and editorial accuracy and intellectual substance. There are many books that are mechanically faultless but which contain untrue, unclear, or even nonsensical ideas. Carefully edited writing tells us, not that the writer speaks truly, but that he or she grasps... the manner in which knowledge is usually expressed. The most devastating argument against a paper that is marred by grammatical and rhetorical error is that the writer does not understand the subject.
“"Rationalism" is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions.”
Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism