Mindy Kaling: Is everyone hanging out without me? (and other concerns)
So things were coming together nicely for me to embark on a full-fledged depression. One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. 57
CS Lewis: Man or Rabbit?
...intellectual humor has sunk very low in our age.
Anias Nin
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
DH Lawrence
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea....maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
Gregory Maguire: Wicked
"People who claim they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us." He sighed. "It's the people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of."
Karl Von Clausewitz
In such dangerous affairs as war, the gravest mistakes are those that stem from benevolent intent.
Plato
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Gorgias
We mold the best and the most powerful among us, taking them while they're still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and incantations we subdued them into slavery, telling them that one is supposed to get more than his fair share, and that's what's admirable and just. But I believe that if a man whose nature is equal to it were to arise, one who has shaken off, torn apart, and escaped all this, who has trampled underfoot our documents, our tricks and charms, and all our laws that violate nature, he, the slave, would rise up and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature would shine forth. 54
They say that it isn't permitted to give up in the middle of telling stories, either. A head must be put on it, so that it won't go about headless. 85
Frederico Fellini
Only serious people can laugh.
Benjamin Franklin
That they can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Samuel Johnson
The only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure.
Mahatma Ghandi
The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible
Most people have no notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
Hobbes: Leviathan
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality
If Nature has destined us to be healthy, I almost dare to affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. p.22
Thomas Paine: Age of Reason
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the, chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
HL Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed--and hence clamorous to be led to safety--by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Pascal
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran
There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. 231
Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
"I thought the best way to seem normal," he said, "would be to talk to people normally about normal things like what's on football and what's on TV. That's the obvious thing to do, right? I subscribe to New Scientist. I like reading about scientific breakthroughs. One time they had an article about how the U.S. army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives? Later, when I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written, Thinks bees can sniff out explosives.
Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"Imagine," he said, "never even thinking 'we are not alone' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be."
Unsurprisingly, a favorite was Air Force One. Everyone knew the dialogue, and whenever we saw Harrison Ford, playing the action hero president, kick Gary Oldman, the bad guy terrorist, out the cargo deck, we would chant in union, "Get off my plane!" 279
Once, when Mississippi suffered hurricane damage, and Senator Trent Lott was among those appealing for federal aid, the President jokingly remarked to me, "Maybe I should just tell them to go it alone, just be true to their ideology, that it's just a matter of state's rights." 311