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PEOPLE
"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker."
- Mikhail Bakunin
"I'm afraid of American Rattlesnakes, but I'm not afraid of pumpkins."
-Erica (friend of Molly, age 7)
"Love is like a giraffe. It's hard to describe, but you know it when you see it."
- Dr. Dall
"The Danish are very accepting. They say, 'Sure, you can bring your kangaroo, or whatever'."
- Ambassador Hassan
"I come from the East. I can wait as long as you want."
- Ambassador Kamal
"Some of the world's greatest ideas, like dresses with zippers, were first thought of as madness."
- Ambassador Kamal
"You can certainly count on your hand the number of world leaders from whom you would buy a used car."
- Ambassador Kamal
"I do nothing with passion."
- Mike Schmidt
BOOKS
"Self-government with help from the central government to even things out. Local control of schools, hospitals, transport, environment. National standards in all these social areas and financial help so that no one goes below these standards. Citizen-owned banks with low interest on loans for houses and schooling and little businesses and farms. Ward republics. I like that. Little local countries. People with the power over their own lives."
- Ernesto Blanco/ Ernesto "Che" Guevara, I, CHE GUEVARA, by John Blackthorn
"Now your materialist thinks that longing is about things. And, for the poor guy, there's something to that. Everybody longs for the basics for himself and his family- shelter, food, a job. But there is more; I mean the longing for peace, for healthy children, for clean air and water, for goodwill in the community, for hope for a better life for your children. Maybe also not to be totally dead when you're dead. But that's a story for another time. It doesn't seem to me you can talk about Aristotle's 'Golden Mean' or Rousseau's 'social contract' to people like these who aren't even on the ladder yet. Aristotle was dealing with Athens, which, despite that war they had- that crazy Peloponnesian one-was a well-off place, and Rousseau was dealing with Enlightenment-though pretty corrupt-France."
- Ernesto Blanco/ Ernesto "Che" Guevara, I, CHE GUEVARA, by John Blackthorn
"Now let's look at T. Jefferson. He was dealing with a society that had roots in the Enlightenment and a yeoman culture and a stable middle class and an educated, more or less egalitarian leadership... He saw that the idea of equality , it applied to a political system of republican representative government, and if truly democratic, could offer hope, could give ordinary people the chance to improve their lives. If this is an idea whose time has come, then we'll see it catch on in other parts of the Latin world and the African world and the Asian world. Who knows, it might even catch on del norte."
- Ernesto Blanco/ Ernesto "Che" Guevara, I, CHE GUEVARA, by John Blackthorn
"-Oh yes, there are two varieties on this side of the Limpopo. The chief difference between them is that the one kind of leopard has got a few more spots on it than the other kind. But when you meet a leopard in the veld, unexpectantly, you seldom trouble to count his spots to find out what kind he belongs to. That is unnecessary. Because, whatever kind of leopard it is that you come across in this way, you only do one kind of running. And that is the fastest kind."
MAFEKING ROAD, by Herman Charles Bosman
"After all, what can they do to shake the confidence of a fellow who's got delusions of adequacy?"
- Fiben Bolger, THE UPLIFT WAR, by David Brin
"If you can't do it twice, you can't do it at all."
- Ender Wiggin, ENDER'S GAME, by Orson Scott Card
"The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you."
- Ender Wiggin, ENDER'S GAME, by Orson Scott Card
"To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themeselves. Nobody understands anybody. And yet somehow we live together, mostly in peace, and get things done with a high enough success rate that people keep trying...Muddling through, that's what human beings do."
- [Bean], SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON, by Orson Scott Card
"I'll have that someday...Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things work out."
- Peter, SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON, by Orson Scott Card
"It's a good thing they brought YOU. If it had just been those other guys, I would have made my stand and fought to the death. But with you here, I had no choice but to give myself up. Good work, soldier."
- Petra, SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON, by Orson Scott Card
"What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell. Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it. And it's delicious."
- [Petra], SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON, by Orson Scott Card
"Nietzsche is not an appropriate role model for the world's only superpower as it enters the twenty-first century."
- THE TAILOR OF PANAMA, by John le Carre
"Not every god has to exist in order to do his job."
- THE TAILOR OF PANAMA, by John le Carre
"Perhaps it is better to be happy and un-sane than sane and unhappy. But surely it is best to be both sane and happy."
- 3001: THE FINAL ODYSSEY, by Arthur C. Clarke
"Then we had a long discussion about the comparative merits of Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked."
- Bridget, BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, by Helen Fielding
"Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."
- [Richard], NEVERWHERE, by Neil Gaiman
"The marquis thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries."
- [Marquis de Carabas], NEVERWHERE, by Neil Gaiman
"He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules and smiles all the time."
- GOOD OMENS, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Evil, in general, does not sleep, and thereby doesn't see why anybody else should."
GOOD OMENS, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand ways, and then devoted their energies to making it worse. There had been times, over the past millenium when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying, 'Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do themselves and do things we've never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got imagination. And electricity, of course.'"
- [Crowley], GOOD OMENS, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and then suddenly they spring Armageddon on you."
- Crowley, GOOD OMENS, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"He had been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people."
- [Crowley], GOOD OMENS, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"The kraken stirs. And ten thousand sushi dinners cry out for vengeance."
- GOOD OMENS, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset."
- Umbopa, KING SOLOMON'S MINES, by H. Rider Haggard
"He laughed, but in the way people do who want to prove they get the joke. The Dutch do this a lot. They appear to live in terror of being mistaken for Germans, and to compensate by finding a funny side to life where none exists. Tell a Dutchman that your dog just died, and he will pretend that you have made some impossibly witty remark."
- THE NEW NEW THING, by Michael Lewis
"[Jim Clark] was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision."
- THE NEW NEW THING, by Michael Lewis
"If your heart did not break now and then, Spring Moon, how would you know it is there?"
- Old Venerable, SPRING MOON, by Bettebao Lord
"Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself."
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, by Friedrich Nietzsche
"...and all I can think about on my way back to my sister's is how difficult it is to function when so much free entertainment exists, and that the government is perhaps trying to keep us docile, trying to keep us busy with mowing the lawn and barbecuing, to keep us from noticing how boring and violent our lives are, how violently boring: the way you can sit and watch tv for hours and hours, and watch people be arrested, thrown down on the ground; watch car crash victims come bleeding and writhing into the emergency room; watch Steve Martin plan his daughter's wedding; watch Cindy Crawford put on lipstick; and all the while there are plenty of real things going on in the world, people who don't have enough to eat and rampant racism and plastic sitting in a hole in the ground where it will stay forever, never breaking down completely... A line, twenty-five miles long, of Rwandan refugees...Cars are violent and NutraSweet is violent, occupying your body like foreign troops, your body having no way to manage the unfamiliar compound. Fluorescentlighting is violent. There are so many ways to irritate the body, to agitate the mind. And the world is like a body; it can't possible manage all this, digest all of it. It curls up, goes to sleep, instead."
- Shannon, WELCOME TO MY PLANET* (*WHERE ENGLISH IS SOMETIMES SPOKEN), by Shannon Olson
"Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally."
- Arkady, RED MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson
"Lincoln is dead, and historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."
- Frank, RED MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson
"It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power."
- Nadia, GREEN MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson
"One could try to regard politics as a science - a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again... trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all."
- Sax, BLUE MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson
"It was a remarkable thing, this being in love. It changed everything. When he worked it was with an extra charge of satisfaction, feeling the sensual rush of the labor. At home he felt like a good housemate, a good friend. People relaxed around him, they felt they were having a good time, they could talk to him - they always could, but now he seemed to give more back. At the pool he swam like a champion, the water was like air and he flew through it, loving the exertion."
- [Kevin], PACIFIC EDGE, by Kim Stanley Robinson
"When you learn things important enough that you feel like teaching them, it always seems possible. Everything's so clear given what you've gone through - the images are there, even sometimes the words to convey them with. But it doesn't work. You can't teach what the world has taught you. All the tricks or rhetoric, the force of personality, the false authority of being a teacher, or pretending to be immensely old... none of that's enough to bridge the gap. And nothing else would be either."
- Tom Barnard, THE WILD SHORE, by Kim Stanley Robinson
“As his brain got busy he could feel further inspirations coming on, bubbling up out of that place in the subconscious that plastic lawn flamingoes come from."
- Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff
"You make compromises in life; not every kid can grow up to become president or a baseball star or a mountain gorilla."
- Robert M. Sapolsky, A PRIMATE'S MEMOIR: A NEUROSCIENTIST'S UNCONVENTIONAL LIFE AMONG THE BABOONS, by Robert M. Sapolsky
"Evolution is driven by struggles for dominance. I've heard it suggested that no herbivore could ever develop intelligence because it doesn't take any cunning to sneak up on a leaf."
- Dr. Jericho, CALCULATING GOD, by Robert J. Sawyer
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
- WEALTH OF NATIONS, by Adam Smith
"Gods, no. Divine Chemists, yes. This universe of ours was devised by someone with a Chemist's mind, a Chemist's obsessive care for detail. The human side...Chemists aren't interested in all that, are they?That's why that side of things is such a mess."
Ben Shepherd, DAYS OF BITTER STRENGTH, by David Wingrove
"Shallow is politically correct here. Besides, Southern California is all about velocity and optimism, which has everything to do with its two most glaring characteristics: freeways and sunshine."
- Elizabeth West, THE CIGARETTE GIRL, by Carol Wolper
"The wheel may be turning, but the hamster's dead."
- Mimi, THE CIGARETTE GIRL, by Carol Wolper
WEBSITES
"You may think you crave true love, but it's not a game for cowards. Neither is Scrabble."
- theonion.com Pisces Horoscope, 1/26/00
"Your future is looking unusually bright this week, which is no surprise, considering the incredible amounts of burning magnesium it contains."
- theonion.com Libra Horoscope 1/26/00
"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
- Unknown
"Never trust a man (George W. Bush, for one) who takes life one syllable at a time."
- Unknown
