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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fa627ff | A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. | Jack Vance | ||
| 11799b4 | Somewhere there is mystery. It impels one to theosophy: to the worship of a space-god, or a god of light." "Theory dissolves the mystery, though it lays bare a cryptic new stratum. Quite likely there is an endless set of these layers, mystery below mystery." | Jack Vance | ||
| d5c535a | Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void that ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four he was .. | dying-earth jack-vance | Jack Vance | |
| 4ae8c9b | If there were no fools,' said Circumbright, 'either among us or among them, we could co-inhabit the earth. there's the flaw in any compromise negotiation - the fact of fools, both among the Teleks and the common men. | fools | Jack Vance | |
| 8875a4d | There had been an attempt to humiliate him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, has no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent. | pain pleasure pride | Jack Vance | |
| 171c2be | My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance. | Jack Vance | ||
| da3c1b3 | The Silver Samarsanda stood above the Jardeen, behind a line of tall pencil cypress: an irregular bulk of masonry, plastered and whitewashed, with a wide, many-slanted roof of mossy tiles. Beside the entrance five colored lanterns hung in a vertical line: deep green, a dark, smoky scarlet, a gay light green, violet, and once more dark scarlet; and at the bottom, slightly to the side, a small, steady yellow lamp, the purport of all being: Ne.. | Jack Vance | ||
| 640e373 | have been prisoner, slave, fugitive, and now king, which I prefer. | Jack Vance | ||
| bfe86b1 | An enemy, perhaps. Ah, so simple. Liane will kill you ten men. Two steps forward, thrust -- thus!" He lunged. "And souls go thrilling up like bubbles in a beaker of mead." | Jack Vance | ||
| b1bb7b5 | I hate you with the hate that I give to all the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses. | Jack Vance | ||
| c581f3a | How I hate you," he said softly. "If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds." | Jack Vance | ||
| f50b250 | A voice issued from the mirror..."The characters read thus: 'Suldrun, sweet Suldrun, leave this room before harm arrives upon you!'" Suldrun looked about her. "What would harm me?" "Let the bottled imps clamp your hair or your fingers and you will learn the meaning of harm." The two heads spoke at the same time: "What a wicked remark! We are as faithful as doves." "Oh! It is bitter to be maligned, when we cannot seek redress for the wrong!.. | Jack Vance | ||
| 2bbc816 | On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Iucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. | opening-lines | Jack Vance | |
| 2f11480 | With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 116f156 | There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. | pastoralism | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 0192cd1 | One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow and tomorrow is the past. Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| af3a51b | He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age--of age and the outdated. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 197dd51 | But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that | ease | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 714b992 | That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 5d947ca | The walls cried out to him. And voices cried out as well from the shadow of the past. He stood and listened to them, and now a strange thing struck him. The voices were there, but he did not hear the words. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6787459 | If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . . | quantum-mechanics science | John Gribbin | |
| 3579a61 | In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: 'At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 37e1df4 | The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight - that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer - matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight - that the complexity of society does not imply a planner. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 007feaf | The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9e358ee | Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1f28a64 | If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of average income, as the latter. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c999e1d | The mind drives the body, which drives the genome. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 19b74c1 | The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it befo.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7e4b097 | Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a85bdf2 | Friedrich Hayek's, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had 'fundamental similarity of methods and ideas', that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring | Matt Ridley | ||
| 20002af | Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7e7cd3d | If your teacher is in a private, for-profit school, however, and you withdraw your child, then the owner of the school will quickly feel the effect in his pocket, and the bad teacher will be fired. In a free system the parent, the consumer, is the boss. Tooley found that private-school proprietors constantly monitor their teachers and follow up parents' complaints. His team visited classrooms in various parts of India and Africa, and found .. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8ce4d8a | The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4dd8059 | The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d812ca6 | The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, 'because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below'. Public policy failures stem from planners' excessive faith in deliberate design. 'They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6d5a102 | We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their p.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c4577c5 | In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top-down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f8ac784 | Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 99ce746 | I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b78d1c2 | Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon. | Matt Ridley | ||
| aefcf8f | Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 046ee90 | E claro que nao ha um unico gene, mas ha algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnifico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pre-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincratica de cada um de nos. Todo mundo tem uma unica e distina natureza endogena. Um self. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 71a5ab7 | Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton's attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider this apparently fatuous fact. People with high IQ s, on average, have more symmetrical ears than people with low IQ s. Their whole bodies seem to be more symmetrical: foot breadth, ankle breadth, finger length, wrist breadth and elbow breadth ea.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7018313 | As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance--the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love with their fate--and never, until my brush with ac.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |