Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[Borachio]

When Švejk subsequently described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in exceptionally eulogistic terms: 'I really don't know why those loonies get so angry when they're kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite. If anyone did this anywhere on the promenade people would be astonished, but there it's the most common or garden thing to do. There's a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of.

Jaroslav Hašek

 

[Arakhor]

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 - 1964), geneticist & evolutionary biologist

 

[Borachio]

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool.

Feynman

 

[Gucumatz]

When I first came to Washington, for the first six months I wondered how the hell I ever got here. For the next six months, I wondered how the hell the rest of them ever got here

- Harry Truman

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

"I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past...my black skin is not a repository for specific values....Haven't I got better thins to do than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden...I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world...Am I going to ask today's white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls?...I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors...it would be of enormous interest to discover black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe...I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other." - Frantz Fanon

 

[Borachio]

How beautiful are your sandalled feet, O prince's daughter!

The curves of your thighs are like the work of a skilled craftsman.

Your navel is a rounded goblet that never shall want for spiced wine.

Your belly is a heap of wheat fenced in by lilies.

Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins fawns of a gazelle.

Your neck is like a tower of ivory.

Your eyes are the pools in Heshbon, beside the gate of the crowded city.

Your nose is like towering Lebanon that looks towards Damascus.

You carry your head like Carmel; the flowing hair on your head is lustrous black, your tresses are braided with ribbons.

How beautiful, how entrancing you are, my loved one, daughter of delights!

You are stately as a palm-tree, and your breasts are the clusters of dates.
I said, 'I will climb up into the palm to grasp its fronds.'

May I find your breasts like clusters of grapes on the vine,
the scent of your breath like apricots,
and your whispers like spiced wine
flowing smoothly to welcome my caresses,
gliding down through lips and teeth.

Song of Songs 7:1-9

 

[cardgame]

I wish my words were people so that I could tie them down and cut away their clothes until everything I say just comes out naked and true.

- a friend

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.”


― Elvis Presley

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

"A society grows great where old men plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit." - Greek proverb

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

"A society grows great where old men plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit." - Greek proverb

That's genuinely inspiring.

 

[Phrossack]

"A society grows great where old men plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit." - Greek proverb

That's an excellent saying. I'll have to remember that one.

 

[cardgame]

It's better defined with a proper attribution elsewhere... I've read it before

 

[Phrossack]

"The Lord God is my armor!"

-supposedly said by King Gustav Adolf, who was unable to wear proper armor due to a painful gunshot wound. He was killed to death after several gunshots and swords punched through his God.

 

[Arakhor]

He was killed to death? That does sound painful.

 

[Borachio]

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear,
But things removed that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art a grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many, now is thine alone.
Their images I loved, I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

Some Elizabethan gent.

 

[Flying Pig]

"The Lord God is my armor!"

-supposedly said by King Gustav Adolf, who was unable to wear proper armor due to a painful gunshot wound. He was killed to death after several gunshots and swords punched through his God.

Also Gustav Adolf: 'what use is a king in a box?', when informed that he was endangering his life by leading his army from the front.

 

[Borachio]

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.

Blake

 

[classical_hero]

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.- Winston Churchill.

 

[KaiserElectric]

He was killed to death? That does sound painful.

Was his assassin Superboy Prime?

Spoiler :

I'd be impressed if anyone got that.

 

[Phrossack]

He was killed to death? That does sound painful.

His death was fairly violent, much like that of another European royal:


Link to video.