Quotes about racing
page 5
Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”
Contributions of Jane Wagner
http://alexpeak.com/twr/racism/
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Source: Oh, The Places You'll Go!
“Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage.”
Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro
“You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.”
Source: The Glass Castle
“A motto of the human race: Let me do as I like, and give me approval as well.”
Source: Reflections
Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5
Source: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
Source: Castle Series, Castle in the Air (1990), p. 31.
Context: "Maybe," he said, "you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite."
"Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer of free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."
Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 7 : 'Violence', p. 222
“The most Beautiful people are the ones that don't look like one race or even one sex”
Source: The Forever War
"Thinking for Oneself" http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter8.html
Essays
Based on a 1957 Ken Purdy quote, first mentioned in a posthumously published interview with Alfonso de Portago: note: :“I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer,” I told Portago, “something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bull fighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere recreations. Would you have said that?”
I tend to agree with Hemingway who said something to the effect that only mountain climbing, bull fighting and automobile racing were sports and that everything else was a game.
Source: Ken W. Purdy (August 1957) "Portaro; The real story of the sizzling Spaniard" https://archive.org/details/sim_car-and-driver_1957-08_3/page/n70 Sports Cars Illustrated (Ziff-Davis: New York) vol. 3 no. 2 p. 63 note: :“There are three sports that try a man,” she remembered Helmut Ovden saying, “bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.”
Source: Ken W. Purdy (27 July 1957) "Blood Sport" https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1957-07-27_230_4/page/92 The Saturday Evening Post (Curtis: Philadelphia) vol. 230 no. 4 p. 92
Source: An early attribution to Hemingway is the essay "Why" by Gene Hill, published in Guns & Ammo and reprinted in 1972 in A Hunter's Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds and Guns (Winchester Press: New York) ISBN 0876910762 p. 96
“Can you giggle while racing for your life and protecting a six-year-old? I can.”
Source: Maximum Ride The Angel Experiment
Nobel lecture (8 December 1982) http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_nobel.html
Variant: races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Context: The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
Voyage to Brobdingnag, Ch. 6
Source: Gulliver's Travels (1726)
“Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.”
Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”
O'Flaherty V.C. (1919)
1910s
Source: Heartbreak House
Chapter XIV: The Atlanta Exposition Address http://books.google.com/books?id=xN45ZsUMgKEC&q=%22No+race+can+prosper+till+it+learns+that+there+is+as+much+dignity+in+tilling+a+field+as+in+writing+a+poem+It+is+at+the+bottom+of+life+we+must+begin+and+not+at+the+top%22&pg=PA220#v=onepage
1900s, Up From Slavery (1901)
Context: No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
Source: The General in His Labyrinth
“We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?”
“Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.”
"Stage Manager"
Source: Our Town (1938)
“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race”
"Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap", a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.”
Source: The Enchantress of Florence
Nobel acceptance speech (1986)
Source: The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982)
Context: I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.
"Have You Learned The Most Important Lesson Of All?" http://www.thehypertexts.com/Essays%20Articles%20Reviews%20Prose/Elie_Wiesel_Essay_Have_You_Learned_The_Most_Important_Lesson_Of_All.htm, published in Parade Magazine (24 May 1992)
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
Source: Blueberry Muffin Murder
“The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other,… but to beeach other.”
Source: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
“This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.”
Source: Big Sur (1962)
“[T]he race is long - to finish first, first you must finish.”
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain
“If you join the rat race — you're in the race of rats.”
Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro
Source: City of Ashes
“for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized”
“Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.”
“Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”
Appendix
1980s, At Home (1988)
Context: I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Social Deterioration
1980s–1990s, Is Reality Optional? (1993)
Source: Winter Moon
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star