Another selection of recently encountered quotes.
To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonised, listed and checked-off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about, by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is, at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.
[Pierre-Joseph Proudhon]
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
[Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance]
I think I’ve discovered the secret of life — you just hang around until you get used to it.
[Charles M Schulz]
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
[William Shakespeare, The Tempest]
5% of the people think; 10% of the people think they think; and the other 85% would rather die than think.
[TA Edison]
Compare with that other often quoted statistic: 5% of people can think and do; 5% of people cannot think; the other 90% can think but don’t bother.
I have no idea what day it is and I’m eating cold parsnips for breakfast. The Christmas brain wipe is complete, fresh mind ready for 2015.
[Girl on the Net ‏@girlonthenet on Twitter]
I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it?
[Joan Baez]
Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn’t interest you, don’t do it.
[Katharine Hepburn]
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
[Edgar Allan Poe]
A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone.
[Unknown]
In our dreams we may all be anarchists, but in our actions, for the vast majority of the time, we’re the most rigid of conformists.
[Will Self; Foreword to Bradley L Garrett, Subterranean London]
This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic!
[Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1984); quoted by Will Self; Foreword to Bradley L Garrett, Subterranean London]
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)]
The game is up for Zone 1; soon it will exist only as a nucleus of tourist hell, the city will become defined by its sprawl and the heart of it will be like Centre Parcs, but with less wholesome family bike rides and more pay-per-hour Gumtree day brothels.
[Anonymous comment on central London]