Moralistic Democracy Quotes & Sayings

I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer's duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better. — W.P. Kinsella

For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table,
how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a pretty
farfetched example; you can't rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planet
earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the
clutter - those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international
dateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean,
for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times in the course of a
lifetime would the equator be a significant factor? — Haruki Murakami

[...] if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
[review of The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, Nature 442, 983-984 (31 August 2006)] — Jerry A. Coyne

There's a price to pay for the speed, and that is danger. And to push that hard on a boat - it does take a lot out of you and is incredibly stressful. — Ellen MacArthur

I do care about style. I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject. — Richard Attenborough

Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers. — Hugh MacLennan

I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Long live your laundry! — Billy Mays

Sam looked at his master with approval, but also with surprise: there was a look in his face and a tone in his voice that he had not known before. It had always been a notion of his that the kindness of dear Mr. Frodo was of such a high degree that it must imply a fair measure of blindness. Of course, he also firmly held the incompatible belief that Mr. Frodo was the wisest person in the world (with the possible exception of Old Mr. Bilbo and of Gandalf). — J.R.R. Tolkien

I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. — Jorge Luis Borges

He doesn't yet understand the outside is a shell for all of us. My beauty is on the inside, where it never fades. — Gena Showalter

The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong? — Alan Watts

Don't mind all those people who say that you should be back to normal in a month or two. Grieving is all part of helping yourself anyway. — Cecelia Ahern

Have you no soul?" is really another way of saying, "Is it possible that your mind with its values and conscience are not even troubled by what your will has chosen and your body carried out? — John Ortberg