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Quotes by English Authors
"It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."
"What good were real feelings anyway?"
"To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin."
"Those that go gold into the furnace will come out no worse."
"There is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it."
"Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before."
"Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools."
"Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose."
"Sometimes I miss the spirit of London, but it's a very gray place."
"You know, there are many alter egos and Gorillaz is a collective of alter egos, really. I think anyone who gets involved in it has to sort of accept that nothing is really as it seems."
"If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics."
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."
"The moral of filmmaking in Britain is that you will be screwed by the weather."
"People always expect you to be jumping out of a Rolls Royce and being in the papers for drunk and disorderly or sleeping around."
"I'd say that it's important for music to be there that gives you a challenge, that rearranges things in your head."
"The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower."
"In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it."
"I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed too - for being married so many times."
"The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate."
"These little grey cells. It is up to them."
"The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor."
"Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible."
"Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it."
"These tapes have been found, which were taken from the desk and various bootlegs. At the time we never got to hear them, they didn't seem to be available or they just got put to one side."
"Habit rules the unreflecting herd."
"It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, - 'Aye,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by."
"Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants."
"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."
"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical."
"Where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too."
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