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| 151 | How can one foresee, without first remembering? | |
| 152 | How much can a man endure? How long could a man continue? These things I asked myself, for I am a questioning man, yet even as I asked the answers were there before me. If he be a man indeed, he must always go on, he must always endure. Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it is also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches... these things, too, are gone. | |
| 153 | How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things. | |
| 154 | Human life is sacred, diff and apim alike. These were deluded people; yes, they had betrayed good folk to terrible fates; but vengeance for the sake of vengeance destroys him who so callously metes out retribution without thought of the deeper motivations. | |
| 155 | Humans have historically distrusted and disliked one another to the point of murder and war over such minor differences as religion, color, language, and the like. That's one rationale Master System had for keeping each colonial world a homogenous race and culture. Yet my children could never truly comprehend why a Crow or a Sioux or a Cheyenne - or a Janipurian or a Chanchukian or even an Alititian - should be judged in any way but by what kind of people they are. But such things have always worked on a small scale, Nagy, particularly when we are crisis-driven or bound together by mutual self-interest, but never in the mass. That is our tragedy. Never in the mass.
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| 156 | I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. | |
| 157 | I can never fully believe or trust you... not after the lies you have told. That is the curse of lying..... Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time. | |
| 158 | I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. | |
| 159 | I distrust anyone who wants to ban something "for the good of the public." | |
| 160 | I don’t think it matters what age you are when you figure it out... I think the important thing is to figure it out before someone else tells you what you want to be, and they get it wrong. | |
| 161 | I don't insist on economical one-shot kills. I'm willing to waste a little ammunition to insure that the other guy gets dead and I stay alive. | |
| 162 | I don't like people who think tolerance is a one-way street. | |
| 163 | I enjoy things with curious properties, and stupidity is most interesting. The more you study it, the further it flees - and yet the more of it you obtain, the less you understand about it! | |
| 164 | I found out later that that was a loaded question. The straight answer was that there are a lot of people in show business who never stop to ask themselves what they're doing to their audience. Some of 'em don't give a damn, as long as they make money. Some of them care a lot, but have very different ideas from mine about what's good for the folks out there in the dark. Most of 'em laugh at the idea that a show can have any effect on people. I guess they're the ones who really think the argument over censorship is silly.
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| 165 | I had... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data. | |
| 166 | I have lived well here. I should like to see this last because I have built it strong and made it good, but I know it will not. Even my books may not last, but the ideas will endure. It is easy to destroy a book, but an idea once implanted has roots no man can utterly destroy.
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| 167 | I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. | |
| 168 | I hereby confess to writing deathless prose, on occasion - and even immortal verse, now and then. But when I do, I do it alone, with only a split of vin ordinaire for company, and I do it for me, myself, only. It's pure self-indulgence, of course - 'art for art's sake' really means 'art for the artist's sake.' It's the sheer personal gratification of doing something as well as I can possibly do it, of expressing my feelings, my view of existence, my self - and it's for me, alone. Oh, I don't mind if other people read it, and it's nice if they like it. Sure, I enjoy praise; I'm human, too. But that's just a by-product, a side issue.... This - this is another matter. It's another thing entirely. This script, I wrote for other people, and I make it with a host of other people. If no one else ever hears it or sees it, it will have failed. Worse: it'll be absurd, without purpose. Without an audience, it's incomplete. | |
| 169 | I know - every educated man should be a critic... and if you're not willing to learn, you have no right to criticize. | |
| 170 | I know, I know. But they’ll solve them. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. | |
| 171 | I mean only, when boys are cowed by abusive authority, Ritalined out of their brains or indoctrinated to believe this God-given behavior is bad that they turn into the followers, the veritable sheeples of stupid cultural morays, folding to high pressure peers and ideological {+ bullshit}. | |
| 172 | I might point out to you that no wise man tells all he knows. And that he who carries tales has little else in his head. | |
| 173 | I never understood how galling it was. Some smug bastard with a ledger comes into town, makes you pay for the privilege of owning something. | |
| 174 | I swear, the more you give a man, the more he demands, and the less happy he becomes. | |
| 175 | I think we should let our children be children. Let them be innocent and enjoy their grade school years. There will be enough pressure on them as they get older... | |
| 176 | I was aware that just because men belong to the same race does not mean that they are immediately and instinctively comrades in adversity. | |
| 177 | I yet dream of a union in which husband and wife are so firmly delighted in one another that they act in concert, and take so much pleasure in one another's company that the bondage of never doing what one wishes, but ever tempering thine own desires by another's whims, seems of little moment. | |
| 178 | I'd been feeling sorry for myself, which is about the most useless thing you can feel: it doesn't do a damned thing for you. You don't feel any better, you don't get any better, and you're too busy moping to do anything to actually make your life any better. | |
| 179 | If a man can find dry wood after three days of rain he's a man to ride the river with. | |
| 180 | If an idea was sound, it had to have a life beyond a leader, or the leader had failed. | |
| 181 | If crooked gambling, thieving, and robbing are covered over, folks will tolerate it longer than outright violence, even when the violence may be cleansing. | |
| 182 | If I were arrogant, you would have more than two small cuts: to use an opponent badly, that is arrogant. To press the Game beyond your own limits: that is stupidity. And you are not a stupid man, kel Duncan. | |
| 183 | If one man dies for what he believes in - would you deny him that right? | |
| 184 | If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing. | |
| 185 | If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives, then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls. You think their ways are wrong. They think you are dinner. | |
| 186 | If you perpetuate the dreams of the past, then you stifle your own dreams of the future. | |
| 187 | If you think you're a slave, then you are a slave... | |
| 188 | If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking for others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so. | |
| 189 | If, in war, you're not willing to die for your cause but your enemy is willing to die for his, a terrible weight has been set on one side of the scales. | |
| 190 | I'm not a professional educator, of course, but maybe if the school system would stop teaching third-graders how to have sex, they wouldn't have so big a problem. | |
| 191 | I'm sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really it's mostly for their own good. | |
| 192 | In a manner of speaking you hide behind women's skirts as you shoot arrows so that when arrows come back at you, you can feign outrage at an atrocity. | |
| 193 | In a wide-open land like this where law was a local thing and no officer wanted to spread himself any further than his own district, a man could do just about what he was big enough to do, or that he was fast enough with a gun to do. The only restraint there was on any man outside of the settled communities was his own moral outlook and the strength of the men with him. | |
| 194 | In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted. | |
| 195 | In other words, the only legal hoe is a union hoe. | |
| 196 | In the end words are just wind. | |
| 197 | In the hills we like our coffee strong but this here would make bobwire grow ona man's chest in the place of hair. | |
| 198 | In this age of social networking, privacy is becoming an ancient relic. Lives can be changed by the posting of a single photo or profile update. And in the case of Tyler, lives can be lost in 140 characters or less. | |
| 199 | In trade between willing parties who share moral values and who deal fairly and honestly with one another, compromise over something like price is legitimate. In matters of morality or truth, there can be no compromise. | |
| 200 | Instead you did what the rest did - what humans always do - you believed that your vision was somehow superior to that of your fellows. You decided that everything would be all right if only people wouild listen to you. And you acted on that wholly selfish belief. | |