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Quotes by Author

"We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."

"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it."

"No one who is at all acquainted with the Indian in his home can deny that we are a polite people."

"The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh."

"Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment."

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston thought. "By making him suffer, he said."Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?..."

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity."

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

"I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old."

"In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love."

"People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics."

"Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit."

"Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret."

"It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood."

"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."

"For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced."

"Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work."

"My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs."

"To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization."

"Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality."

"Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people."

"Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil."

"The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life."

"Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best."

"The clan is nothing more than a larger family, with its patriarchal chief as the natural head, and the union of several clans by intermarriage and voluntary connection constitutes the tribe."

"In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors."

"But to have a friend, and to be true under any and all trials, is the mark of a man!"

"I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not."
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