Herf Quotes & Sayings

What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events? — Epictetus

Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke.
Les Miserables — Victor Hugo

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area. — David Foster Wallace

Always remember, my little angel of mercy, it's the strays that are feral.... — Suzanne Steele

Though anti-Semitism had been only one of several sources of Nazi voting strength, after 1933 Hitler placed anti-Semitic ideologues, the most important of whom were Joseph Goebbels, Otto Dietrich and Alfred Rosenberg, at the top of the key opinion-shaping institutions. In a dictatorship resting on the 'leadership principle', Hitler's anti-Semitic convictions defined policy. — Jeffrey Herf

Up in the north of Scotland, a lot of the villages are completely Viking names. A lot of Vikings came down and settled in Scotland and in Ireland. And a lot of them didn't, but they took plenty of us with them - mostly the chicks. — Gerard Butler

A person who has a dream knows what he is willing to give up in order to go up. — John C. Maxwell

You can't have adventures without poetry. — Avi

They continued standing there, looking like a pair of horror movie twins, one dark, one light. — Maggie Stiefvater

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on policy. — Mark McKinnon

The most clear way to decide the actor is to watch them doing stuff during their downtime. When they do something that's making both of you laugh, you see if there's a character or situation that could be written into. — Mike O'Brien

HERF stands for High Energy Radio Frequency, and it basically means a big, nasty pulse of raw radio energy. You can build a HERF gun that will tune the power from a standard car battery, focusing it into a pencil-beam of ugly brute force by means of a mini satellite dish and use it to kill a laptop at twenty paces. The whole thing'll cost you under $200 if you're smart about parts. — Anonymous

lust, greed, desire, and supremacy; — Karen Marie Moning

Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence. It is the victim who is responsible. This was Hitler's constant and deeply paradoxical claim. As Jeffrey Herf points out, he and his propagandists had to maintain two completely contradictory ideas: 'one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim'.23 In general, as Vamik Volkan notes, dualists tend to combine 'paradoxical feelings of omnipotence and victimization'.24 On the one hand we are masters of the universe; on the other we are the devil's slaves. — Jonathan Sacks

If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment. — Claud Cockburn