1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2835
2836
2837
2838
2839
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6eb2cfb | Fortune passes everywhere. | fortune | Frank Herbert | |
| bd730a0 | These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness | belief-system belief-systems beliefs dune dune-arrakis dune-house-atreides dune-messiah evil evil-men faith falsehood falsehoods good goodness historical historical-perspective history history-of-mankind history-of-thought justice-of-god moral moral-law morality morals religion religion-philosophy religion-spirituality religions religious religious-faith virtue virtues | Frank Herbert | |
| a1aae8c | There's no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo. Only an open sky full of changes. Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change. Does that tell you nothing? | Frank Herbert | ||
| 9baa857 | You cannot fix your gaze upon it! Senses cannot record it. No words describe it." -Alia" | Frank Herbert | ||
| f5020ad | On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul." | caladan desert inheritance power scrabble sea | Frank Herbert | |
| 01adf6e | You can't build politics on love," he said. "People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos." | Frank Herbert | ||
| 56b575a | The terrain enforced its own rhythms. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 3f01708 | Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e74c268 | Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4027f92 | The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2abe81c | Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins. It is the smell of War. | original | Neal Stephenson | |
| b85665b | Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words. | books media technology | Neal Stephenson | |
| 7610f02 | Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| dd20e12 | Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d3dc0f1 | You have responsibilities, now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9d8a9ed | There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 90171ec | Apparently these three had left half of the surviving population of China seriously pissed off at them, as well as making mortal enemies with a rogue, defrocked Russian organized crime figure. In their spare time they had stolen money from millions of T'Rain players, created huge problems for a large multinational corporation that owned the game, and, finally--warming to the task--mounted a frontal assault on al-Qaeda. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| df01335 | Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith. | religion | Neal Stephenson | |
| b6d3bb0 | Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 815a0d6 | The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ef1ad42 | after that it's just a chase scene. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 85908a4 | People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. | revision | Neal Stephenson | |
| 6b714fb | Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of.. | history society technology western | Neal Stephenson | |
| d43a0ee | If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 45635b7 | Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bfdf521 | This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 82e527f | They made data a controlled substance. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a69a23e | What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 01f55fc | The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code--but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it--they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillu.. | contradiction | Neal Stephenson | |
| a6a2c76 | It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1e1dda3 | Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever. | delusion docile dying frightened funny happy jesus people population religion scared sleep story terrified terrifying truth | Neal Stephenson | |
| 6586c1b | THERE IS MORE TO THIS THING OF LOVE THAN MEETS THE EYE. I AM GOING TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS A GREAT DEAL BUT I DON'T THINK IT WILL GET ME ANYWHERE. I THINK MAYBE THEY'RE ALL RIGHT WHEN THEY SAY THERE ARE DOME THINGS I WON'T KNOW ABOUT UNTIL I'M OLDER. | Louise Fitzhugh | ||
| e2f0e1a | Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off." | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 883cb38 | The fear of today," he said, "always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It's a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace d.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 7573e86 | The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 84d91d0 | I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn't think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| b96a20d | Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 9e5ff65 | I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 0fabfa8 | A three-piece Mexican band was making the kind of music a Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels an a drawn-out, sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazon, a lady who is "linda" but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair and when he isn't making with.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 68d039c | Marlowe's the name. The guy you've been trying to follow around for a couple of days." "I ain't following anybody, doc." "This jalopy is. Maybe you can't control it. Have it your own way. I'm now going to eat breakfast in the coffee shop across the street: orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, honey, three or four cups of coffee, and a toothpick. I am then going up to my office, which is on the seventh floor of the building right opposite yo.. | machine-gun noir-breakfast philip-marlowe poor-harry-jones so-noir-it-hurts | Raymond Chandler | |
| c583b5d | Philip Marlowe, 38, a private licence operator of shady reputation, was apprehended by police last night while crawling through the Ballona Storm Drain with a grand piano on his back. Questioned at the University Heights Police Station, Marlowe declared he was taking the piano to the Maharajah of Coot-Berar. Asked why he was wearing spurs, Marlowe declared that a client's confidence was sacred. Marlowe is being held for investigation. Chief.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| cd727b6 | I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can't tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 345f553 | Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end. | Paul Murray | ||
| 22f8173 | He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job." She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married." "I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else." | Raymond Chandler |