Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[SS-18 ICBM]

"To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic."
-on the Creed's meaning, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Assassin's Creed: Revelations

 

[GoodGame]

"If you really want to rebel against your parents: outearn them, outlive them, and know more than they do."

Henry Rollins

I like that one.



“I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.”

“My daughter, Lucy, knew one of the scriptwriters for the Simpsons. He said he would like to write an episode involving me. I accepted immediately because it would be fun, and because the Simpsons is the best thing on American television.”

--Dr. Stephen Hawking

 

[Verarde]

"In the meantime, the leaders of the legislative clubs and coffee-houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability. They speak with the most sovereign contempt of the rest of the world. They tell the people, to comfort them in the rags with which they have cloathed them, that they are a nation of philosophers; and sometimes by all the arts of quackish parade, by shew, tumult, and bustle, sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions, they attempt to drown the cries of indigence, and to divert the eyes of the observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state." -- Edmund Burke

also sigged.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"Isn't napoleon that guy who assasinatied george w. bush?"
-EYAccount, providing an example of a typical YouTube comment.

 

[madviking]

"Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively."

- Socrates, as quoted in Plato's Apology.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"To have been arrested, interned and deported by the English, whom I had regarded as my friends, made me more bitter than to have lost freedom itself."
-Max Perutz, 1962 Chemistry Nobel laureate (X-ray crystallography of hemoglobin and globular proteins), as quoted in p.5, Selected Topics in the History of Biochemistry: Personal Recollections, Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 2000.

 

[Dachs]

"...We have grabbed the initiative."
"Yeah, for maybe five minutes."
"Well, life is just a succession of five minuteses."
-Malcolm Tucker and Nicola Murray MP, The Thick of It Season 3 Episode 8

 

[Josu]

- "Utopia is on the horizon. I walk two steps, it moves two steps. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further.
It does not matter how much I walk, I'll never reach. So what good is utopia? To do this: just to walk"

Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer

- "As we said yesterday"
Fray Luis de Leon, Spanish humanist, the day he come back to teach after spending 4 years in jail due to inquisition.

And one regarding football/soccer

- "No we are not lost, Noriega* just scored"

Jon Sobrino, catalonian jesuit, born into a basque family. He taughtUCA (Universidad Centro Americana) in El Salvador. There was a attack of a paramilitary battalion in El Salvador and Jon Sobrino and other Jesuits hid in a bell tower where they listened to a Athletic Club's football match in the radio. One of the Jesuits was so frightened that said:"We are lost".

*Noriega was a football player in Athletic Club de Bilbao from 1980 to 1987

 

[Tee Kay]

Ah, Galeano. Here's two more.

"I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it."

"I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people."

- "As we said yesterday"
Fray Luis de Leon, Spanish humanist, the day he come back to teach after spending 4 years in jail due to inquisition.

Reminds me of

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted"

- William Connor resuming his newspaper column after World War II.

 

[NickyJ]

 

[Dachs]

"A lot of good things came out of the eighties! Miami Vice, deregulation of the stock exchange, us [the Tories] being in power..."
-Phil Smith, policy advisor to Peter Mannion MP, The Thick of It: Rise of the Nutters

 

[Godwynn]

Un jour viendra où les boulets et les bombes seront remplacés par les votes, par le suffrage universel des peuples, par le vénérable arbitrage d'un grand sénat souverain qui sera à l'Europe ce que le parlement est à l'Angleterre, ce que la diète est à l'Allemagne, ce que l'assemblée législative est à la France!

Spoiler :

A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe."
-a maimed slave in Suriname in Chapter XIX, Candide by Voltaire.

 

[Traitorfish]

"If I had been an Italian, I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." - Winston Churchill to Mussolini.

That man really was vile.

 

[Flying Pig]

"If I had been an Italian, I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." - Winston Churchill

That man really was vile.

At the time, Leninism meant civil war, famine and purges and had given birth to a reigime at least as dangerous to live under as Nazi Germany - Communist-hate back then doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

 

[say1988]

Even without that, as a man he was pretty bad.

 

[Traitorfish]

What was the likelihood of civil war, famine, and Stalinist regimes emerging in Italy c.1922, exactly? Enough to warrant Il Duce?

 

[Flying Pig]

What was the likelihood of civil war, famine, and Stalinist regimes emerging in Italy c.1922, exactly? Enough to warrant Il Duce?

I have no idea, but the point stands that it had been tried a grand total of once and the results had been horrific - and there seemed no indication that they weren't intrinsically linked with the ideology. In fact, the British - along with most of the Western World - generally backed Hitler against Stalin (before he started making good his plans of conquest and before the Holocaust got underway) because they judged the former to be the lesser of two evils. With the evidence that they had, it was a very fair assessment. Certainly, even with the Holocaust in mind, there isn't a huge amount to say that one was worse than the other.

Even without that, as a man he was pretty bad.

Again, for a Harrow-educated Englishman and former soldier, growing up when he did, he wasn't half bad.

 

[Traitorfish]

This is the same Churchill that advocated the use military terror to end the General strike, the Iraqi revolt and the Irish independence movement. I am not convinced that his anti-socialism was purely humanitarian.

But, enough about that. Getting off-topic.

 

[Flying Pig]

This is the same Churchill that advocated the use military terror to end the General strike, the Iraqi revolt and the Irish independence movement. I am not convinced that his anti-socialism was purely humanitarian.

As for the Rhondda affair, the troops were requested by the local Chief Constable, and Churchill actually blocked their actual deployment. Don't know much about the Iraqi revolt, but may I remind you exactly what the Irish independence movement was - it was nothing less that a near-civil-war, and we were using military force to get rid of much the same sort of people until quite recently.