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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 08423a8 | Men reacted as they always did; some with an extreme of generosity, giving what little they could spare to strangers; others behaved with an equal and opposite extreme of harshness, demanding outrageous things in exchange. Honest men became thieves, honest women prostitutes, criminals became saints, all driven onward by an idea of what they were leaving behind. | Iain Pears | ||
| 8d0eb95 | Young men of my type are prone to be impatient of details, and give their loyalties without regard to evidence. | Iain Pears | ||
| ba40478 | creating a void which others seek to fill through conversation. | Iain Pears | ||
| 5edca64 | They respect their betters, and fear those below them. | Iain Pears | ||
| 57bcf93 | Comrade Kropotkin has argued in the past that Darwinism is but a reflection of capitalism because it emphasises competition and struggle over cooperation and coexistence. It justifies the exploitation of man by man, and strengthens the class ideology of the oppressors." "Excellent. So what will be new today?" | Iain Pears | ||
| 584bc0f | The result was most peculiar, and it took a lot of work to get it laid out properly, but first tests were satisfactory. I called it "Momentum" and told anyone who saw it that it was a biting critique of modernity, representing how the culture of the past (the pergola) was contaminated and overwhelmed by the detritus of consumerist industrialism that was covering over the elegance of civilisation with mass-produced conformity. It was thus bo.. | Iain Pears | ||
| d75a6c7 | I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could not be converted into one of their little numbers it could not possibly be there. Einstein's biggest mistake. | Iain Pears | ||
| bd5cfea | The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn't know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind. | Iain Pears | ||
| a3a6d60 | Like the aristocracy, you can tell a reporter's status by his clothes and manners. The worse they are, the higher up they are, | Iain Pears | ||
| bc2db6f | I did not like Ravenscliff by instinct, but I was beginning to find him fascinating. A book-reading, socialist-sympathising, child-begetting capitalist fraud. | Iain Pears | ||
| 5944b70 | The world was full of such madmen in those days. Imprisonment is not the way to deal with such people; half measures merely feed their pride. Leave 'em alone or hang 'em, in my opinion. Or better still, pack them off to the Americas, and let them starve. | Iain Pears | ||
| aafdedd | Although I do not need to be surrounded by others in order to feel alive, I do need some conversation and distraction. | Iain Pears | ||
| 179c9fd | The French, I knew, were well ahead in this area, constructing gigantic palaces in the centre of cities which offer every luxury to travellers prepared to pay well to avoid any real contact with the place they were visiting. | Iain Pears | ||
| 6935941 | How do we justify calling ourselves civilised, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief ando of common values which strech back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilised if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbours ara massacred, your lanas laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?>> | Iain Pears | ||
| 10a858b | The rolling sound of a good hymn badly sung is particularly evocative. | Iain Pears | ||
| 4b984f4 | A company is a moral imbecile. It has no sense of right or wrong. Any restraints have to come from the outside, from laws and customs which forbid it from doing certain things of which we disapprove. But it is a restraint which reduces profits. Which is why all companies will strain forever to break the bounds of the law, to act unfettered in their pursuit of advantage. That is the only way they can survive because the more powerful will de.. | Iain Pears | ||
| 70327aa | An in experienced traveler would imagine that their land contains the finest buildings, the biggest towns, the richest, best-fed, happiest people in the world. | Iain Pears | ||
| 013e6aa | Politeness, I learned at her salon, is a demanding discipline; to convince others without recourse to the tricks of the demagogue or bully requires a high level of intelligence, especially when the audience is learned and intelligent. | Iain Pears | ||
| 11f777a | some were simple idlers spending an inheritance pretending to be poets or painters; and a couple were medical students, who had a wildness of such severity that I would hesitate ever to place myself under their care. | Iain Pears | ||
| faff5f2 | Nu pot sa spun ca sunt multumit. Dar asta este. Ce poti face? Oamenii astia insista sa imparta faima cu mine. | Iain Pears | ||
| 18b9f63 | O viata petrecuta lucrand sub egida Ministerului Apararii il invatase o sumedenie de tehnici de supravietuire intr-o lume care facea ca lupta armata sa para civilizata si plina de stil. | Iain Pears | ||
| 365204b | Dar Bottando stia, datorita unei intelepciuni ascutite in ani intregi de activitate, ca nu exista nici un document care sa ateste ca responsabilitatea nu-i mai apartinea, iar asta era ingrijorator. | Iain Pears | ||
| 2ac3068 | Tommaso nu voise decat un strat de protectie intre el si responsabilitate, in cazul in care se intampla ceva rau. | Iain Pears | ||
| dd0708f | Atat timp cat un numar suficient de oameni cred ca e autentic, chiar e. | Iain Pears | ||
| 5b5bbb7 | I cannot remember a single painting, although I do remember trying hard to be deeply impressed by them at the time. | Iain Pears | ||
| d9a7f3d | although individuals and small events did affect the course of historical development, the influence of even major figures was strictly limited. In | Iain Pears | ||
| 03150a3 | But what's the point of freedom? Do you think you can change anything?' 'Of course not. We are waiting.' 'For what?' 'Until the world changes on it's own. That is the one truth of history. Everything ends. Civilisations, empires, however powerful and strong. They all end, sooner or later. When it does, we will be there, with all the old ideas and thoughts, preserved and ready to blossom. | civilization dystopia end-of-civilization history preservation-of-knowledge | Iain Pears | |
| 5cff491 | men had turned their minds to the passion of faction, and learned to despise the old wisdom because they could not read it afresh. | Iain Pears | ||
| 42c84d3 | And there will be no waste, I promise you," he went on, waving his finger in the air as he got into his stride. "You see, the trouble with the professor is that, once he stops for lunch, he tends to lose interest. He drinks a good deal, you know," he confided. "What's left over gets thrown away or gnawed by rats in the basement. Whereas I will pickle you..." | Iain Pears | ||
| d5d0b74 | I did very much hope that he wasn't frittering away his time on nonsense when he had a fantasy to dream about. | Iain Pears | ||
| a0c5f6b | Mr. Milton set out in his great poem to justify the ways of God to men, as he says. He has not considered one question, however: perhaps God has forbidden men to know His ways, for if they did know the full extent of His goodness, and the magnitude of our rejection of it, they would be so disheartened they would abandon all hope of redemption, and die of grief. I | Iain Pears | ||
| d2f846e | Just because your choice is predetermined does not mean you do not have a free choice before you take it (516) | Iain Pears | ||
| 3e9a6c9 | Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial o.. | Iain Pears | ||
| 10c6840 | For the sake of objectivity, the programme analysed both histories - real and alternative - without being informed which was which. It concluded that the second, actual sequence of events was statistically so improbable that it could not possibly happen. ... We are required to believe a) that a drug-addled, womanising inexperienced Catholic with strong links to criminal organisations could defeat the most experienced politician in the count.. | Iain Pears | ||
| be22379 | When an experiment was to begin, all women were excluded for fear their irrational natures would influence the result, and an air of fervent concentration descended. | science women | Iain Pears | |
| afed17b | Although of course I am aware that it changes colour in a jar. But we know why, surely? The heavier melancholic elements in the blood sink, making the top lighter and the bottom darker." "Not so," I said firmly. "Cover the jar, and the colour does not change. And I can find no explanation of how such separation could occur in the lungs. But when it emerges from the lungs - at least, this is the case in cats - it is very much lighter in colo.. | cat experiments | Iain Pears | |
| dabbf47 | But, however splendid a job may seem when one does not have it, it rarely stands up to close acquaintanceship. | Iain Pears | ||
| 91d0c06 | Her mother was fine. Her mother was always fine. Fine was her way of saying she didn't exist. | Jane Haddam | ||
| 60fe166 | There is no creation without destruction. There is no light without dark. That's what my nuns didn't understand. It isn't a competition. Good and evil are all part of the same thing. | Jane Haddam | ||
| 326768e | If being ugly was a crime, they'd be hunting that woman down with helicopters and bloodhounds. | Judith McNaught | ||
| 10fb908 | Police Headquarters was a relief. It was a monument to municipal graft in the twenties, when graft had really been graft, and Gregor could look on it with fondness. Politicians on the take didn't invent a lot of pious nonsense for themselves in those days. They stole and knew they were stealing and reveled in it. Then they came up with something suitably high-minded to say on public occasions. To Gregor's mind, that beat the tortured self-j.. | Jane Haddam | ||
| 686a993 | If she had had the money, she would have put herself through enough plastic surgery to look respectable again. She didn't understand women, like Betsy, who had the money and didn't want to. For the same reason, she would never live in one of the outer boroughs or in the suburbs, no matter how much more space she could get for how much less money. It said something about you that you could not stay in Manhattan, that you valued a few extra s.. | new-york new-yorkers | Jane Haddam | |
| ea0de66 | had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine. | Jane Haddam | ||
| 9a1fd39 | The sun provides the moon with its brightness. | Anaxagoras |