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"Miss Austen's novels - seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer - is marriageableness."
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"Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion."
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Personal Development
"Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner."
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"Some lurid things have been said about me-that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth-that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin."
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"We know of no spectacle more ridiculous-or more contemptible-than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth."
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"What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!"
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Personal Development
"All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs."
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"Hater" and "hate" are used when no critical thought can be formed. We can definitely do better."
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"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."
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"Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile."
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"Only a man of knowledge is capable of giving constructive criticism."
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"Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate."
Morality
"There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly."
Justice
"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
Art
"Extremes meet and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility."
Morality
"God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings and with each therefore a new idea new inventions and new applications."
Time
"It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion."
Philosophy
"Hitch your wagon to a star."
Inspirational
"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying."
Perception
"Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man."
Happiness
"There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes."
Society
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