Ten Quotes - page 84
During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.
George Orwell
I note that once again there is serious talk of trying to attract tourists to this country after the war...[b]ut it is quite safe to prophesy that the attempt will be a failure. Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away. ... But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-five past, and which have done their best to turn the pubs into mere boozing shops by excluding children from them.
George Orwell
A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?".... Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.
Lin Yutang
A regime that has a Constitution which denies the sovereignty of the people and where candidates are selected by the regime and the Parliament can not vote into laws its own proposed bills, is not a system representative of the people. This regime interprets divine laws as it pleases and elections are like those held under the Soviet or Saddam's regime. All this is to make the world believe that they enjoy a certain degree of legitimacy. Elections must be boycotted. To vote for this regime is to prolong its survival. Not to turn out will be the demonstration that the people rejects this theocracy. What the people is asking for is a secular Constitution based on the Universal Charter of Human Rights. Reformists couldn't do anything. We have lost ten years. Time has come for change.
Reza Pahlavi
O my boy! thou hast been to me like a man who took a stone, and threw it up to heaven to stone his Lord with it. And the stone did not hit, and did not reach high enough, but it became the cause of guilt and sin.
O my boy! if thou hadst honoured me and respected me and hadst listened to my words thou wouldst have been my heir and wouldst have reigned over my dominions.
O my son! know thou that if the tail of the dog or the pig were ten cubits long it would not approach to the worth of the horse's even if it were like silk.
O my boy! I thought that thou wouldst have been my heir at my death; and thou through thy envy and thy insolence didst desire to kill me. But the Lord delivered me from thy cunning.
Ahiqar
In the last ten years, as editor in chief of Today's Caregiver Magazine, I have interviewed many people who are living in the public eye, all of them having something of importance to say to family caregivers. Most times they've become caregivers after becoming famous, usually due to themselves or a family member taking ill. Our keynote speaker today is unique in that he is a professionally trained caregiver before he became known to all of us. And through the unbelievable constraints that have been placed on his time, he's never lost sight of his goal of becoming a teacher and helping children living with developmental disabilities. Only his classroom has become a whole lot larger than he ever expected.
Clay Aiken
[After leaving the w:Exposition Universelle (1855) ].. .I went to the Courbet exposition. He has reduced the price of admission to ten sous. I stayed there alone for nearly one hour and discovered a masterpiece in the picture, they rejected [the jury of the official Salon exhibition in Paris]. I simply could not tear myself away from the sight of it.. ..In [Courbet's painting 'The Studio'] the planes are well understood. There is atmosphere, and in some passages the execution is really remarkable, especially the tights and hips of the nude model and the breasts.. .The only fault is that the picture, as he painted it, seems to contain an ambiguity. It looks as though there were a real sky in the middle of the painting. They [The Salon-jury] have rejected one of the most remarkable works of our time, but Courbet is not the man to be discouraged by a little thing like that.
Gustave Courbet
Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world-any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.
Isaac Asimov
Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one, not ten, not ten thousand, not a million, not ten millions, not a hundred millions but a billion, two billions of us all - the people of the world. We will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it, we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquillity, in security, in decency, in peace. You plan the wars, you masters of men - plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.
Dalton Trumbo
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.
Arthur Conan Doyle
For ten long weary years prior to 9/11, WBC warned you daily on the mean streets of this nation that your sodomite sins will be avenged by an angry God except you repent. You persecuted us for our trouble, thereby aggravating your great transgression. On 9/11/01, God Almighty dealt backsliding America a staggering blow.
Fred Phelps
In the middle of Tom Cruise's speech, there's this sudden, dramatic pull-in to his face, and there's tears in his eyes, and he says, "we live in a cynical world," and that's when my brother went, "FUCK YOU!" at the top of his... oh, my God. That was... it was such a horrible, rude thing to yell, and I was laughing so hard. I could not get the air in to make the sound of laughter. People ask me, "what is your favorite comedy of all time?" Jerry Maguire, when my brother yells, "fuck you!" at Tom Cruise. It is a 90-minute setup to one punchline. It's like not jerking off for ten years, and then painting the garage! Oh, my God, I'm seeing dead kings!
Patton Oswalt
The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1, 1999. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name hardly mattered, in any case. What mattered was the effect.
Stephen King
The world is again on the move. That happens about once a century, and when such a displacement process (Umschichtungsprozess) is over it is no good coming along ten years later and saying that we were not on the spot because we happened at the time to be busy with our confessional disputes. No: we must be ready to hand; and he is safest who has a united nation behind him.
Joseph Goebbels
These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so soon as you began to observe them; but to me, just after I make them, they seem to be indisputably human beings. It's afterwards, as I observe them, that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.
H. G. Wells
...In the Aboriginal world we give way to all emotions. In the ‘British', the present white generation of Australian people have been told that to cry is weakness, and if a ten year old boy gets up and cries they say, My goodness! But in the Aboriginal world, to cry is a beautiful thing. To us it's compassion...
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Every day, as the work went on, the Virgin was present, directing the architects, and it is this direction that we are going to study, if you have now got a realising sense of what it meant. Without this sense, the church is dead. Most persons of a deeply religious nature would tell you emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually were dead-born, after the thirteenth century, and that church architecture became a pure matter of mechanism or mathematics; but that is a question for you to decide when you come to it; and the pleasure consists not in seeing the death, but in feeling the life.
Henry Adams
