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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing."
"Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was."
"This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."
"How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers."
"It is energy - the central element of which is will - that produces the miracle that is enthusiasm in all ages. Everywhere it is what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action."
"The test of mountain-top experiences, of mysticism, of visions of God and of solitariness is when you are "in the soup of actual circumstances."
"There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!"
"During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent."
"And most countries are now reducing the number of conscripts and increasing the professionals that are available because they're available on short notice."
"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge."
"The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing."
"Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it."
"Monkeys who very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings."
"Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!"
"Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue."
"A different world cannot be built by indifferent people."
"Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty."
"Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there."
"No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men."
"Jesus doesn't bring anything up from the wells of human nature--He brings them down from above."
"But so far as countries are concerned, I don't go to a place to see what's there, but who is there."
"I'd like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit."
"The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave."
"If you open your mouth in the dark, you will speak while in the wrong mood--darkness is the time to listen."
"Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal."
"Wanted has gone into second, third and fourth printings of the individual issues and the north American printings of Wanted #1 are now close to 100,000."
"OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us."
"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."
"Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise."
"His locked, lettered, braw brass collar, Shewed him the gentleman and scholar."
"The people who influenced me most were the people who said I would never make it. They gave me a thirst for revenge."
"Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men; and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society."
"To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it."
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