Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
It is well known that all collectors are willing to steal and murder if that is what’s needed to add a certain item to their collection, but that is not in any way a stain on their moral character.
-Karel Čapek, The War With the Newts
No, a proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.
-Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien
There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.
-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
Now youse can’t leave.
-Sonny, A Bronx Tale
Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?
-Charles Ives
Perfect nonsense goes on in the world.
-Nikolai Gogol, The Nose
If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?
-Chris Blackhurst, editor of The Independent, 2011-2013
Otto: I ain’t gonna be no repo man. No way.
Marlene: It’s too late. [hands him $25] You already are.
–Repo Man
The way some men think about women has a lot more to do with their upbringing than the amount of women playing guitar in metal bands.
-Liz Buckingham
It’s easy to have good manners. They’re free. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have them.
-Lemmy Kilmister, Interview Swedish TV
I’m glad words exist.
-NCM
All the concepts men live by are a product of historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly coloured feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.
-Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
We don’t want your money, moon man.
-Spongebob Squarepants
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
-Unnamed Bush Administration Official, via Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine
I don’t want to face my fears. I’m afraid of them.
-Spongebob Squarepants
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, yeah.
-The Jesus and Mary Chain, Inside Me
What matters it to the unknown man whether a Caesar or a Pompey is at the top of all things?
-Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero
In the end, all the courage and skill in the world could not overcome ignorance and arrogance.
-Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
A man’s tongue makes enemies more bitter than his sword.
-Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero
The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again.
-Kang, Treehouse of Horror VII
I was a medium-level juvenile delinquent from Newark who always dreamed about doing a movie. Someone said, “Hey, here’s $7 million, come in and do this genie movie.” What am I going to say, no?
-Shaquille O’Neil on why he accepted the lead role in Kazaam
“And the moon shall turn the colour of blood” would surely be a more exciting byline for that Missouri-based writer’s now widely-discredited plans to get everyone to “paint the moon” with hand-held laser pointers at various times this weekend (from 8pm local UK time, Sat 2001-10-27). Objections include the divergence of the beams, diffraction caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, and the fact that the moon isn’t a shiny flat mirror hanging there in space but an imperfectly reflecting sphere which is incredibly bright already due to ambient sunlight. Nonetheless, the guy behind the idea is unrepentant, maintaining that “we need to have dreams that are bigger than ourselves” -and maybe he has a point. In these troubled times, perhaps we all need reminding that when we all work together and really put our minds to something, we still can’t achieve the impossible.
-NTK
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.
-Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.
-J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash
It’s the kind of dramatic story line (the good kind) that [Major League Eating] has been waiting for ever since Kobayashi, whose jaw-dropping eating feats gave competitive eating a major boost in legitimacy, was barred from sanctioned competition because of contract disputes. A high-profile rivalry between incumbent and ascendant — one not seen since Kobayashi and Chestnut — could send MLE into a new golden age.
-Danny Chau, Can Matt Stonie Bring About a New Golden Age in Competitive Eating?
Everything the Soviets ever told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true.
-Russian joke
Conservative, n.
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Some of us are tired
Where we are is copasetic
Fuck that, let’s go
We can always eat along the way
-Shellac, Dude Incredible
For a while, O King, the gods had sought to solve the riddles of Time, for a while They made him Their slave, and Time smiled and obeyed his masters, for a while, O King, for a while. He that hath spared nothing hath not spared the gods, nor yet shall he spare thee.
-Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods
“You are a mammal I believe?”
“That’s rignt.”
“Well then, happy mammaling!”
– Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries
Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.
-PM Malcolm Turnbull, remarks on unregulated cryptography
There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
-Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around
And through this world I’ve rambled
I’ve seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
Some with a fountain pen
-Woodie Guthrie, The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd
The American people have got to go about their business. We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our Nation to the point where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop.
-President George W. Bush, October 11, 2001
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
-Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
-Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Dead Flag Blues
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
-1 Corinthians 13:11, King James Version