Shabby Quotes - page 2
A single tiny cell had decided the fate of a population pressed so close to the ultimate limit of the planet's resources that there was no margin for error. Facing such risks, how could any sane and responsible ruling group dare to demand still more mouths to cry for food? It was a shabby, horrible way to run a world.
Lester del Rey
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."
Mikhail Bakunin
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.
Charles Dickens
At our worst in the Middle East, we unreservedly supported-or enthroned-medieval despots who suppressed popular liberation efforts, thus driving moderate dissidents into the arms of fanatics. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. In the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Iran to Guatemala. But the shah always falls. Would that we could tattoo that on the back of every diplomat's hand: The shah always falls.
Ralph Peters
I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, - it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt - in my highest moments, ... because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.
James Howard Kunstler
It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. ... "House of Sand and Fog" relates not a plot with its contrived ups and downs but a story. A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave.
To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of House of Sand and Fog, we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires.
Roger Ebert
Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, "but this is frightful!”
"Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”
His eye stabbed at hers. "Would you?”
"Well... No.”
"Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time....”
"Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”
"Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too-in your heart-not so?-whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”.
Poul Anderson
Sheckley at his best is nobody but Sheckley; his ability to make what may roughly he described as moral points with a sort of genial free-wheeling ingenuity is purely his own. There is also a second-best Sheckley, when it is obvious that he is not trying very hard; then the unlikeliness of his stories becomes tedious and often enough the genial note turns sour and snickery; in this phase, he writes like John Collier in a shabby grotesque mask. There is also a third Sheckley, have none of the Sheckley aura about...
Robert Sheckley
I feel that what is wrong with scores of modern novels which show literary quality, but which are repellent and depressing to the spirit is not that the writers have rejected a morality, but that they have one which is unexamined, trivial, and lopsided. They have a base concept of life; they bring immense gusto to their portrayals of what is perverse, shabby, and sordid, but they have no clear notion of what is Evil; the idea of Good is unattractive to them, and when they have to deal with it, they do so in terms of the sentimental or the merely pathetic. Briefly, some of them write very well, but they write from base minds that have been unimproved by thought or instruction. They feel, but they do not think. And the readers to whom they appeal are the products of our modern universal literacy, whose feeling is confused and muddled by just such reading, and who have been deluded that their mental processes are indeed a kind of thought.
Robertson Davies
