Quotes about something
page 63

“Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/18/congressman.muslims.ap/ (July 16, 2005).

“You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

"'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)

Change

“I still feel like I gotta prove something. … There are a lot of people hoping I fail. But I like that. I need to be hated.”

Howard Stern (1954) American radio personality

[Ana Marie, Cox, Howard Stern and the Satellite Wars, 2005-03, Condé Nast Publications, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/stern.html, Wired News, 2007-12-30].
Howard Stern and the Satellite Wars, Wired Magazine (March, 2005)

Hate, People, Hope, Feeling

“I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."… I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.”

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Japanese-born British author

Rukeyser, Rebecca. " Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat https://www.guernicamag.com/mythic-retreat/" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015. Interviews

People, World, Education, Way

“Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

"Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks", O'Reilly (11 February 2009) http://blip.tv/file/1996369/

Time

“The “magnificent Psalm of Praise to the Creator with which Genesis opens” is filled with magnificent mistakes, and is utterly absurd. “The beautiful legend of the first sin and its fateful consequences” is probably the most contemptible story that was ever written, and the treatment of the first pair by Jehovah is unparalleled in the cruelty of despotic governments. According to this infamous account, God cursed the mothers of the world, and added to the agonies of maternity. Not only so, but he made woman a slave, and man something, if possible, meaner—a master.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Answer to Lyman Abbott (unfinished), responding to Abbott, Lyman. "Flaws in Ingersollism." The North American Review 150, no. 401 (1890): 446-457.

God, Fate, World, Beauty

“A man must have something to grumble about; and if he can’t complain that his wife harries him to death with her perversity and ill-humour, he must complain that she wears him out with her kindness and gentleness.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Ralph to Milicent

Death

“Much of what we see in the universe," said Hugo, "starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Imagination, Universe

“Noble souls, whose brightness the greed of fortune cannot dim, have a kingly something, which urges them to contend on equal footing with persons of the most massive dignity and pits freedom of speech against arrogance.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

126.
Every Good Man is Free

Soul, Freedom, Personality

“Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

“Trash is something you get rid of—or disease. I'm not something you get rid of.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her self worth, p. 46.
Autobiography

Disease

“I got myself into a lovely little—shall we say controversy—with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.”

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) American composer

Virgil Thomson (1981). A Virgil Thomson Reader, p.548. New York: E.P. Dutton Inc.
See: André Breton

Love

“Perceiving involves more than being sensibly aware of something present to the senses; it involves the activity of perceiving. This is the activity of a person, and in perceiving, the whole person is involved, not merely one or other of his sense organs.”

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) British philosopher

As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 206

Sense, Personality

“Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

A Talk With David Fincher (1999)

Love, Time

“I didn't realize how much of a Hoosier or a Midwesterner I was until I moved to New York. It's weird -- growing up in Indiana, I wanted to get out, and now I completely romanticize Indiana. It just seems like there's a greater focus on family back there, which I suppose is something that kind of stayed with me.”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

Bob Kostanczuk (June 24, 2001) "Gaffigan laugh again with Northwest Indiana native bounces back from shaky sitcom by hooking up with new 'Ellen' show", Post-Tribune, p. D1.

Family

“My tattoos symbolise something to me, after all they will remain with me forever.”

Aiysha Saagar (1980) Australian singer

Personal quote, [daily.bhaskar.com, Aiysha Saagar Famous Quotes, http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/ENT-photos-aiysha-saagar-gets-sexy-panther-inked-on-body-3969102-PHO.html]

Tattoo

“There is another meaning that might be attached to this admonition to be oneself; that one should not try to disguise himself. I suspect this comes nearer to what psychologists mean when they urge people to be themselves. It is presumed that the person who faces the world barefaced is more spontaneous, that he expresses himself more fully, and that he has a better chance of developing all his resources if he assumes no disguises.
But this doctrine of psychological nakedness in human affairs, so much talked about today and which allows the self neither make-up nor costume, leaves very little to the imagination. Not does it invite one to be venturesome. I suspect, for example, that in the Garden of Eden it might have occurred to Adam to take a chance much sooner than he did if Eve had been paying a little more attention to her wardrobe. As it was I hear she had to bribe him with an apple. Later on they say she contrived a saucy little something out of fig leaves.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

Source: The Language of Hypothesis, 1964, p. 157-8

People, World, Imagination, Chance

“To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

Thinking, Distant, Time

“You can truly see that there is some melting going on. When you see it, all of a sudden you say, 'Hey, that issue that we've been talking about off and on over the years, there really is something to it.”

Saxby Chambliss (1943) American politician

Global warming fear lights fire under Congress http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/23/MNGOGLBFPB1.DTL&type=science SF Chronicle (September 23, 2006)

“It was dark. Something had fallen on top of the cabin light, turning the cabin into a black tunnel. I couldn’t hear anything at all. The roll didn’t stop. It continued to port, and for just a few seconds I was sitting on the ceiling in the dark.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 155

Light

“I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating.”

Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) Brazilian racing driver

Interview for Racing is in My Blood, 1991 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHuadnT588w

Life, Question, Learning

“Something I was not aware had happened suddenly turned out not to have happened.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Joe Joseph, "Elementary lessons in logic for enquiry's bemused counsel", The Times, 18 January 1994.
Evidence to the Scott Inquiry, 17 January 1994. Major was speaking of his time as Foreign Secretary in 1989 when the guidelines for arms exports to Iraq had been relaxed, although he had not been told. At one point, when the decision to relax the guidelines was criticised, it was decided to defend the Government by claiming that the guidelines were changed only in wording and unchanged in effect.
1990s, 1994

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Life, Hostility, Happiness, World

“Light is something very special. It has nothing to do with white. Either you see it or you don't. [George] de la Tour doesn't have light; Monet hasn't any light. Matisse, Goya, Chardin, Van Gogh, Sam Francis, Kline have it. But it has nothing to do with being the best painter at all.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

Quote of Mitchel in Marcia Tucker's Whitney catalogue (1974); as cited in Jane Livingstone‘ in The Paintings of Joan Mitchel, ed. Jane Livingstone, Joan Mitchell, Linda Nochlin, p. 35
1975 - 1992

Light

“They rightly adminish us that Christ taught that our speech should be Yea, Yea, and Nay, Nayl yet they do not seem to me to understand it clearly, or if they do understand it to obeu it. For though in many places they should often have said Yea, it has never been Yea. When those leaders were banished, against whom we wrote as best we could, and asked for an oath they would not reply except to the effect that through the faith which they had in God they knew they would never return, and yet they soon returned. 'The Father,' each said, 'led me back through His will.' I know very well that it was the father - of lies who led them back; but they pretend to know it was the Heavenly Father. Here is something worth telling: when that George (whom they call a second Paul) of the House of Jacob [Blaurock], was cudgelled with rods among us even to the infernal gate and was asked by an officer of the Council to take oath and lift up his hands [in affirmation], he at first refused, as he had often done before and had persisted in doing. Indeed he had always said that he would rather die than take an oath. The officer of the Council then ordered him forthwith to lift his hands and make oath at once, 'or do you, policemen,' he said, 'lead him to prison.' But now persuaded by rods this George of the House of Jacob raised his hand to heven and followed the magistrate in the recitation of the aoth. So here you have the question confronting you, Catabaptists, whether that Pail of yours did or did not transgress the law. The law forbids to sweat about the least thing: he swore, so he transgressed the law. Hence this knot is knit: You would be speerated from the world, from lies, from those who walk not according to the resurection of Christ but in dead works? How then is it that you have not excommunicated that Apostate? Your Yea is not Yea with you nor your Nay, Nay, but the contrary; your Yea is Nay and your Nay, Yea. You follow neither Christ nor your own constitution.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

As quoted in ibid, p. 263-264

God, World, Faith, Law

“Today, people’s mood is very much like that: if the coffee is bitter they’re going to have a bad mood all day long. You could be having a perfect day and all of a sudden you get fired. And that’s it. there goes your beautiful day. Maybe they’ve had a beautiful life all life long, and then something will happen that will completely devastate them. But, you can go beyond all that to have something that’s permanent, to have something that is a true experience, to have an experience of yourself, to have an experience of what makes you alive.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Sao Paulo, Brazil, January 30, 1980
1980s

Life, People, Beauty, Coffee

“I have never had to look up a definition of honor. I knew instinctively what it was. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine. If I was stripped of my honor, I would choose death as certainly and unemotionally as I clean my shoes in the morning. Honor is the presence of God in man.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline (1980), p. 46. Said by character General Bentley Durrell.

Death, God, Shoe, Question

“I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales -- like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord -- because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance.”

Lee Ritenour (1952) American jazz guitarist, session musician, and composer

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 114, 0-679-74275-1]

Music, Thinking

“It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Life

“A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world--something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear--is nothing but a cheap hustle.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(VIII.4) Del Rey, p. 282
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

God, World, Religion

“You -- (applause continues) -- you know, the idea that you have to wait on line for eight hours to cast your ballot in Florida -- there's something the matter with that. You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever, and get home and then have a -- still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that, because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives. (Light applause.) But for ordinary working people, who have to work eight hours a day, they have kids, they got to get home to those kids, the idea of making them stand for eight hours to cast their ballot for democracy is wrong. We ought to make voting easier to do. Mail -- Oregon has got it right. (Applause.)”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

Source: Take Back America 2005 conference, in Washington D.C. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/7/11437/00894, June 2, 2005

People, Democracy, Home, Idea

“Perhaps Archbishop Paul-Émile Léger suffered from what they call in French a taste for the sensational. He was like one of those matadors who, as the cadence of the oles gets more and more rapid, are always trying to find something more daring to do. He grew hasty in his desire to produce new spectacles and maybe did a few ill-considered things. But on the whole I remain impressed with him.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

on one of his mentors
The Establishment Man by Peter Newman

Suffering

“Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Way

“To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, (which is the real trick for most people) but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology, particularly paleontology, as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don’t know squat about at all. Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course, religion. But to believe in creationism, you don’t have to know anything about anything, and its better if you don’t! Because creationism relies on ignorance. It is not honest research! It is a scam, a con job exploiting the common folk, and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears. Creationist apologetics depends on misrepresented data and misquoted authorities, out-of-date and out-of-context, and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

People, Fear, Religion, History

“Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 26 (p. 463)

Way, Light, Universe, Speed

“Structure is a primary element of experience and not something that is added by the mind. In this respect, it can be said that the techniques of understanding call for a drastic revision of the usual modes of thought that treat being and understanding as independent or at least as separable from one another.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Source: The Dramatic Universe: Man and his nature (1966), p. 9

Understanding

“Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'… He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)”

Tim O'Brien (1946) American novelist

In the Lake of The Woods (1994)

Love, Life, Truth, World

“You can not take something that an artist created during the creative process, and then discarded, and say it is an authentic work of that artist.”

Marc Randazza (1969) American writer

“… more recently, in late September 2001, and during an acrimonious argument which erupted in a weekly Israeli cabinet meeting between Prime Minister [Ariel Sharon] and his Foreign Minister [Shimon Peres], the following interchange unfolded: Peres was warning Sharon that refusing to heed American requests for a ceasefire would endanger Israeli interests and "turn the U. S. against us." Sharon yelled at Peres in exasperation: "every time we do something you tell me the Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clearly, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America and the Americans know it." This major ideological convergence between anti-Semites and Jewish supremacists in Israel is hardly surprising if one understood Zionism's project as nothing short of turning the Jew into the anti-Semite.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in the journal New Politics, Winter 2002, Vol. VIII, Iss. 4, pg. 89.
On Ariel Sharon

People, Time

“Yet its essence was the certitude that his life was not totally at the mercy of chance. Somehow, it was more important than that. This sense of power inside his head — which he could intensify by pulling a face and wrinkling up the muscles of his forehead — aroused a glow of optimism, an expectation of exciting events. He knew that for him, fate held something special in store.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), p. 26

Life, Fate, Optimism, Sense

“It's always a tendency to compare our country in my time to the most perfect democracies of the world. I don't mind that. But now, what we hear is "oh let's try to understand these people. After all, Islam is something special," when what they are doing is absolutely contrary to Islam. Now, everybody is trying to say "well, let's try to understand these people", these people who are killing, massacring others, the people they don't like just like flies. But in my case, it is to compare it to the most perfect government of the world.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

David Frost (January 1980), The Shah Speaks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKUQUDf5IBo&feature=related (video) Interviews

People, World, Democracy, Understanding

“Oh, early Kandinsky.. [stuck her early]. Well no, they had that at the Art Institute in Chicago, don't forget. See, everybody, to do 'modern art' then [New York, mid-forties], seemed to me, when you were going 'modern' [both chuckle], it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought... I loved Picasso, but it just wasn't for me... Well, I don't! I have some of those [early] paintings from LeLavandou - they're in storage - and from Mexico. They were Expressionist landscapes, or boats on the beach or something like that, which I still do. Sort of going abstract, going towards..”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

first side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Love, Art, Painting, Forgetting

“If I'm in, you know, especially in a poor area, and I see guys walking like they're thugs down the street, I don't care what color they are, I go "That guy looks like they're a thug, and looks like they're tough, okay… If they try to shake me down I'm gonna ignore them and keep walking, and if they come up to me and try to put a hand on me, I'm gonna punch 'em right in the throat. 'Cause I don't wanna jump on top on of 'em and hurt my knees and stuff, when I slam their head in the ground. Plus, I don't wanna kill 'em. 'Cause then I'd have to go to jail and stuff, and they'd have to find that it was done in self defense. Been down that road." So, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "Alright. I'm gonna punch this guy in the throat." I'm thinking how hard am I gonna punch him. And I'm not thinking he's a black guy. I'm thinking the guy's walking like a thug, thinks they're tough, and I'm thinking about how I'm going to defend myself. Just like when I've been at the Coast, a few years ago, and walk out of a restaurant in South Padre and they're having a biker rally—and it wasn't like a nice biker rally, most rallies are nice people—it was like thug wannabes, rode up with a motorcycle…and were looking at me, and I was thinking "Okay. Alright. That guy is taking his helmet off. I'm gonna punch him in the throat the minute he tries to get up and do something, and then I'm gonna assault those next three guys. Then they'll probably pull a weapon. I need to take that." I mean, that's what I'm thinking whenever something like that is going on. I can't help it. I'm thinking, "Alright, I'm ready to kill." That's just how I am. And I'm thinking, "Alright. Okay. Instantly assess these guys. These are probably ex-con, real criminals. I've got my three kids here. That gives me, you know, just turbo dinosaur power. And I'm thinking, "Control yourself. Don't have a fight, unless you absolutely got to."”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

You know, the man in me is ready to take all on! and... you know what I'm talking about, don't you? ARGH, you scum! I hate gang members and filth! And it has nothing to do with black people. But I will stump your head in if you start a fight with me, you thug scum! Anyways, excuse me ladies and gentlemen. "Alex Jones Self-Defense Rant" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMJ_pxy2eU, July 2013. 2013

Hate, People, Color, Guy

“Any time a whole bunch of kids like something, they find a reason to ban it. If kids suddenly started stuffing napkins into their pockets and really liked doing that, they'd find a reason to forbid it.”

Michael O'Donoghue (1940–1994) American actor and writer

Mr. Mike's America: A Comic's Trek with SNL's First Head Writer (1983)

Time

“When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

Nature

“According to child-experts—and every child is an expert on something—the function of a parent is to provide information, entertainment, transportation, and spot cash on demand.”

Roger Price (comedian)

Forward to The Power of Negative Thinking (1955)

Parent

“Just as Darwinian adaptationists assume that every biological phenomenon must be explained in terms of natural selection (no matter how unconducive to reproductive fitness it may appear initially), so too Nietzsche assumes that whatever explains “life” must also explain these particular instances of life which appear hostile to it. "'Life against life,'" Nietzsche says is a "self-contradiction" that "can only be apparent; it has to be a sort of provisional expression, an explanation, formula, adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something, the real nature of which was far from being understood" (GM III:13). … The crux of Nietzsche’s explanation turns on three claims:
(1) Suffering is a central fact of the human condition.
(2) Meaningless suffering is unbearable and leads to "suicidal nihilism" (GM III:28).
(3) The ascetic ideal gives meaning to suffering, thereby seducing the majority of humans back to life.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Life, Hostility, Nature, Suicide

“One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers. Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth. My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

Women, Men, People, World

“Everyone leaned over the map and examined it with interest. Here was a tangible thing to look at, to make them feel that something was being accomplished. Everything’s under control, Lord Darcy said wryly to himself, we have a map.”

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 6 (p. 51)

Feeling

“!-- What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born babies don’t see any difference between them, their playpen and their Dad. It’s all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it’s not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept ‘I’ we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn’t it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story. -->If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe. We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line: in the beginning, there was the word. By giving sky one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God, World, Intelligence, Idea

“Everything I've done in the last few years has been grim and gritty and traumatic. I've played floozies, psychopaths, assassins, crackheads…. It's nice to do something with a lighter touch, something that makes you laugh but has a serious point to make. I get to wear a lot of great clothes as well.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

Take a Girl Like You Cast and Credits http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/takeagirl/credits.html. pbs.org. 2000. Guillory speaks about her role in the television film, w:Take a Girl Like You.

Clothes

“He signed himself prince of this, lord of that, baron of the other thing and claimant to the dukedom of something else.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 2

“Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational.”

Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) British economist

Source: The Economic Problem (1925), Chapter I, "The Problem Profounded", p. 1

Life, Nature, Universe, Animals

“I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I’m thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004)

People, Confidence, Thinking

“There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either or wit of sublime.”

Jonathan Swift book A Tale of a Tub

Preface
A Tale of a Tub (1704)

Hope

“God's servant is something; God's slave is greater.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

God

“Politicians are all on the same platform when it comes down to me. I think it’s because they think that if they can satisfy the Muslim fundamentalists they will get votes. I believe I am a victim of votebank politics. This also shows that how weak the democracy is and politicians ask votes by banning a writer … Even though I am not staying there, she (Banerjee) has not allowed my book ‘Nirbasan’ to be published. Also, she has stopped the broadcast of a TV serial scripted by me after Muslim fundamentalists objected to it. She is not allowing me to enter the state… This is a dangerous opposition … I wrote to Mamata Banerjee. But there was no response to that… No I am not going to write to her again. I do not think she will consider my request. I feel very hopeless because I expected something positive. I think when it comes down to me, she has similar vision like that of the Left leaders…. I do not consider India as a foreign country. The history of this country is my history. It’s the country of my forefathers. I love this country and in Kolkata, I feel at home because I can relate that place to my homeland. … I have sacrificed my freedom and have been sacrificing for a big cause… All these (problems) are because of my writings. I could have stopped writing against fundamentalists and possibly the bans would have been removed and I had got back my freedom and allowed to enter my motherland again. But I will never do that. … I have spoken of humanism and equal rights for women and secularism stating that religion and nation should be treated separately. One should not get confused with nation and religion. Rules should be made based on equality, and not on religion. … I know that only by writing I will not be able to change an entire society. The laws need to be changed. Equal rights cannot be established in a short time, it requires a long time and huge efforts … I have got many awards but the best is when people come forward and tell me that my writings have help them change their vision,… I do not think I would have been treated in the same manner if I was born there (Europe). I am a writer, not an activist… I write with a pen and if you have any problem why do not you pick up a pen to protest…. The surprising thing in this part of the world is that they have picked up arms against me because I have expressed my views. I have never enforced my thoughts on anybody ever, then why they are trying to kill me. I am not a supporter of violence.”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

Taslima Nasrin about Mamata, Indian Express https://indianexpress.com/article/india/mamata-banerjee-turned-out-harsher-than-left-in-my-case-taslima-nasreen-4486028/

Love, Women, People, Books

“Our Youth is fleeting
Old age is just around the bend
And I can't wait to go grey
And I'll sit and wonder
Of every love that could have been
If I'd only thought of something charming to say”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

The Sound of Settling
Transatlanticism (2003)

Love, Youth, Age, Waiting

“The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir."”

Robert McCammon book Boy's Life

It just happens.
Introduction.
Boy's Life (1991)

Love, Life, People, Truth

“They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to [South] Korea and live here.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

On how South Koreans view U.S. expatriates in South Korea
2010s, Interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

Understanding

“If a firearm is used by a criminal or psychopath with evil intentions, then it is a tool for evil. But if it is used for good (to defend life and property), then it is a tool for good. A firearm by itself has no sentience, no volition, no moral force, and no politics. The proper term for this is an adiaphorous object--something that is neither good nor evil. A firearm is simply a cleverly-designed construction of metal, wood, and plastic in the form of a precision tool.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: Tools For Survival (2009), p. 150

Life, Evil

“There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.”

Anton Chekhov book After the Theatre

After the Theatre (1892)

Love, Beauty, Personality, Indifference

“I wonder why prostitution is illegal. Why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away?”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson (1989)
Interviews, Television Appearances

“I've reached the pinnacle of my career. I just feel that I don't have anything else to prove. When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense of 'to prove something' as a basketball player, it's time for me to move away from the game of basketball.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Announcing his retirement from the Bulls (1993-10-06) Classic NBA Quotes: Michael Jordan, 2006-11-24, NBA Encyclopedia, NBA Media Ventures http://www.nba.com/history/Classic_NBA_Quotes_Jordan.html,

Feeling, Game, Motivation, Sense

“While going through training in the army, I was very puzzled about the number of things which we had to do… why learn to lace our shoes a particular way, walk back and forth through puddles, salute commissioned officers… Only much later did I realize that, in audition to combat training, basic training was a stage setting device, especially for the establishment of legitimate position power. Those in command were not ready to put their trust in informational power: Particularly in combat conditions, officers would not be able to give us reasons. Coercive power, under limited surveillance, would also not be sufficient. We must learn, as Tennyson said of the Light Brigade, that when ordered to do something, "ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die."”

Bertram Raven (1926) American psychologist

So it was important that we were ordered to do meaningless things, and learn to obey legitimate authority without question, while coercive power was still hovering in the background.
Source: "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999, p. 176, as cited in: Rick Houser et al. Gaining Power and Control Through Diversity and Group Affiliation, 2004, p. 12

Shoe, Way, Question, Light

“Beneath the anger of Trump supporters lies something deeper – shame, the shame of no longer being able to get ahead, the bitterness that their children will be worse off than they are, the resentment of being told they are backward, and fearing that they might be. Like Russian nationalists who put their faith in Putin, and Chinese patriots who back Xi, Americans who support Trump are responding to their private or collective humiliation.”

Clive Hamilton (1953) Australian economsit

Trumpism as Whitelash (November 19, 2016)

Children, Fear, Faith, Support

“You don't get something for nothing
You can't have freedom for free.
You won't get wise
With the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dream might be.
-- Something for Nothing (1976)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Dreams, Sleep, Freedom

“All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Tennessee Williams" (1956), p. 97
Profiles (1990)

Communication, Madness

“The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all. P. 155”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, An Upbuilding Discourse December 20, 1850

Forgiveness, Learning

“The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and 'muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures IV and V, "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Soul, Fashion, Hell, Change

““What are you going to do for a career?”
Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.””

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (3) “After One Decade”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Education, Imagination, Time

“I like to take man-made objects and push them to the point where they almost lose their reference, so that they become something else, take on other alliances.”

Cornelia Parker (1956) English artist

Quote in: Cornelia Parker - Quotes - The European Graduate School http://www.egs.edu/faculty/cornelia-parker/quotes/, at egs.edu, 2015.

“Another one goes, and I'm so underwhelmed that I can't even be bothered to use the obligatory exclamation mark after 'wicket'. All it took was the most rudimentary wicket-to-wicket hustle from Reekers, who is something of a corpulent Ian Austin, and Haq was cleaned up as he played miserably around his pads.”

Rob Smyth (1977) English/Irish rugby league player

Cricket World Cup 2007; Group A: Scotland v Netherlands; Over-by-over: Scotland innings http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricketworldcup2007/story/0,,2040562,00.html (22 March 2007)

“When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 36

Religion

“.. when I see people making quote 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough, that is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing, it has to be a trialogue. Whether that third thing - it must be, to reverberate and make trouble, you have to have trouble and contradictions, it has to become complex because life is complex, emotions are complex, - whether that third element is a still life of something, or an idea or a concept, in each case it has to be a trialogue and above all has to involve you.... The real thing that matters is how involved you are in that.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Life, People, Quotes, Idea

“A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us. A certain dog painted by Courbet (French 19th century painter) is like the story of a poetic and romantic hunt.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

1919
as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 440
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Dogs, Art, Appearance, Painting

“I come from the stage so being involved with such a gigantic film was just a new thing for me which I really loved. And for sure I would love to do something like this again. There's lots of things that have opened up for me. I'll just make sure I'll make the wisest decisions because this is a very delicate moment. And someday I will go back to the stage because that's where I feel at home.”

Silvia Colloca (1977) Singer, actress, author and TV cooking personality

An Interview with Dracula and his Brides (2004)

Love, Feeling, Home, Decision

“Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh).”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

In Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, Sam Hunter; as quoted in Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, Spain, 2006, p. 37
1950's

Art, Mountain, Sense, Teachers

“I'd like to start the show by showing you something I'm very proud of. You'll have to step back, though.”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Reality...What a Concept (1979)

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p. 14

Men, God, World, Religion

“I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered early in my life, practically when I was a child, that I could do something that in the end I finally wanted to do all my life. It has something to do with being completely removed from oneself, which doesn't necessarily mean one is uncomfortable inside oneself. It just means it's a great relief to be inhabiting somebody else. It can be a tremendously liberating sensation.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Dennis McLellan, "Obituary: Paul Scofield, 86; award-winning British actor," The Los Angeles Times (2008-03-21)

Life, Feeling

“[W]hat is happening is what left-wing revolutions do tend to produce, whether they’re talking about the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution, and that is students – the next generation of revolutionaries – become not only more radical than their radical professors, but they turn on them so the revolution tends to consume its own. So now people who think of themselves of impeccably left-wing will say something that offends some group of radicalized students – perhaps students that they themselves helped to radicalize – and suddenly they are the ones under fire for not conforming sufficiently to the contemporary orthodoxy.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

People, Thinking, Help

“Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

‎note in her Journal, 3 June, 1902; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals, ed. Günter Busch and ‎Liselotte von Reinken (1998), p. 278
1900 - 1905
Variant: Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.

Color, Painting

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

Death, Hate, People, Feeling

“I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that… so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon.”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

Meaningoflife.tv interview, 2013

Love, Understanding, Thinking

“You nominate yourself to be the one who will courageously do what you think ought to be done, even if everyone is pressing you to do something else.”

Eric Maisel (1947) American writer

Source: The Atheist’s Way (2009), p. 65

Courage, Thinking

“The whole tendency of civilization is…towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society. The ever growing complications of civilization create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of the existing services. I am of the opinion that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour. I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands. We may do something better with the canals, and we are all agreed that the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 154
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children, Age, Country

“Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Reading Shadows, p. 28.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading

“I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it's something you have to earn. And because a Scientologist does, he or she has the ability to create new and better realities, and improve conditions.”

Tom Cruise (1962) American actor and film producer

Transcript of Tom Cruise on Scientology (January 16, 2008)

Thinking, Reality

“There is something intrinsically upside down and counter-intuitive in the relationship between money and happiness.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 2, Odd Versus Even, p. 70

Money, Happiness

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Earliest instance of this quote found on Google Books is the heading to a chapter entitled "How to Make Free Money From Your Website" from 2001 https://books.google.com/books?id=7ogreSDhbCEC&q=ghandi#v=snippet&q=ghandi&f=false, where it is attributed to "M. K. Ghandi" [sic]. Disputed

“If I'm gonna poke something into it, it's not going to be my finger.”

Bill Allred

Radio From Hell (March 28, 2007)

“When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

People

“This midget, whose name was Domenico, once introduced me to a good-looking man who was something like his butler. One year later, the poor little man was found on a dumpheap outside of Rome. The young man had killed him, just a block away from this bar we're sitting in right now! Truth sometimes is stranger than fiction…”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Truth

“What I believe is this: Catalunya is not Spain, it is something else and you have to feel it.”

Thierry Henry (1977) French association football player

After more than 18 months in the Catalan capital, Henry has become a firm believer in the Barcelona philosophy.
Source: [Thierry Henry: Catalunya is not Spain, http://www.insideworldsoccer.com/2009/02/henry-catalunya-is-not-spain.html, inside World Soccer, 27 February, 2009]

Feeling