““Neither of us is very trustworthy, eh?”
“Pfutz!” Reich said emphatically. “We don’t play girl’s rules. We play for keeps, both of us. It’s the cowards and weaklings and sore-losers who hide behind rules and fair play.”
“What about honor and ethics?”
“We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code… not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.””

— Alfred Bester , book The Demolished Man

Source: The Demolished Man (1953), Chapter 6 (p. 84).

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Alfred Bester 18

American science fiction author 1913–1987

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“Let us assume that we invited an unknown person to a game of cards. If this person answered us, “I don’t play,” we would either interpret this to mean that he did not understand the game, or that he had an aversion to it which arose from economic, ethical, or other reasons. Let us imagine, however, that an honorable man, who was known to possess every possible skill in the game, and who was well versed in its rules and its forbidden tricks, but who could like a game and participate in it only when it was an innocent pastime, were invited into a company of clever swindlers, who were known as good players and to whom he was equal on both scores, to join them in a game. If he said, “I do not play,” we would have to join him in looking the people with whom he was talking straight in the face, and would be able to supplement his words as follows: “I don’t play, that is, with people such as you, who break the rules of the game, and rob it of its pleasure. If you offer to play a game, our mutual agreement, then, is that we recognize the capriciousness of chance as our master; and you call the science of your nimble fingers chance, and I must accept it as such, it I will, or run the risk of insulting you or choose the shame of imitating you.” … The opinion of Socrates can be summarized in these blunt words, when he said to the Sophists, the leaned men of his time, “I know nothing.””

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Therefore these words were a thorn in their eyes and a scourge on their backs.
Socratic Memorabilia, J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), pp. 165-167.

“Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Source: The Fry Chronicles

“The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don't. No, I haven't forgotten Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don't. There is no warrior's honor among terrorists.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

“Honor was in surviving, not fair play.”

Steve Perry (1947) American writer

Source: Matadora (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 4)

“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. […] There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can't save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today.”

Greta Thunberg book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Declaration of Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion, Parliament Square, London, 31 October 2018.
Cited in No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Penguin Books, 2019, page 12 (ISBN 9780141991740).
2018, "Almost Everything is Black and White" (October 2018)

“Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 76.

“Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech in Cleveland http://books.google.com/books?id=o3j10P6YFZIC&pg=PA1090&dq=%22nation's+honor+is+dearer+than+the+nation's+comfort%22 (January 1916)
1910s

“Liberals believe being friendly and fair will make the world better. But our world runs by horrific rules. Fair-play doesn't change the rules. You just accept them.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

at KAPU, Konferenz der Begrenzten, Linz 2016

“Men can frighten us, other women can frighten us, and sometimes we worry so much about what frightens us that we wait to have an orgasm until we are alone. We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”

Lisa Taddeo (1980) American writer and journalist

Source: On women being told to control their own impulses in “Lisa Taddeo on her bestseller Three Women: 'I thought I was writing a quiet little book'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/lisa-taddeo-interview-three-women in The Guardian (2019 Dec 6)

“The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.”

Michael Korda (1933) British writer

As quoted in Powered by Instinct : 5 Rules for Trusting Your Guts (2003) by Kathy Kolbe, p. 136

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Alfred Bester 18

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