Nothing Fair In This World Quotes & Sayings

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. — Maria Semple

But if all the fair folk take to the Havens, it will be a duller world for those who are doomed to stay. — J.R.R. Tolkien

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. — John Perry Barlow

A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all, and new to me. But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass. — Thomas Traherne

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland — Arthur Conan Doyle

You young folks today think you invented the world," Aunt Will said. "Still, a dash of unlawful scrumping might work for you. A lot more folks have tried that recipe than my own, even if we don't hear testimonials."
She chuckled naughtily at that suggestion. Jesse giggled a bit herself.
The important thing was that her aunt was nodding and smiling again.
"But beware, DuJess," Aunt Will told her. "Every cure has its side effects. It only seems fair to warn you. I suspect that a regular tonic of Piney Baxley can be potently habit forming. — Pamela Morsi

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so - whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair. — Kurt Vonnegut

Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works. — John Perry Barlow

This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a "better land," without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world? — Henry David Thoreau

with aides while he wrote his memoirs, Mein Kampf, meaning 'My Struggle,' in which he gave the world's leader fair warning about what was to come. Of course, they didn't listen to him. They never do. "When Hitler got out of Landsberg, there was a gift waiting for him. One of his followers had managed to find their flag, blood and all. They presented it to Hitler as a memento of the Beer Hall Putsch, the incident that brought him to national prominence. To — Steve Martini

We love a saint, though he has many personal failings. There is no perfection here. In some, rash anger prevails; in some, inconstancy; in some, too much love of the world. A saint in this life is like gold in the ore, much dross of infirmity cleaves to him, yet we love him for the grace that is in him. A saint is like a fair face with a scar: we love the beautiful face of holiness, though there be a scar in it. The best emerald has its blemishes, the brightest stars their twinklings, and the best of the saints have their failings. You that cannot love another because of his infirmities, how would you have God love you? — Thomas Watson

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. — J.R.R. Tolkien

That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World's Fair. — Erik Larson

The television reports gave me my first inkling of a world beyond my own, a world that wasn't fair or equal, a world of poverty, war, disease and famine. But I also realized that this state of affairs wasn't necessarily a given, and that we have it in our power to make a difference, to make the world a better place for all. We have that choice. One thing's for sure, though - if we do nothing, it will be a given. — Chrissie Wellington

Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little. — Kate Grenville

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees. — Mark Gevisser

Much of the world is beautiful, and much more is at least fair to the eye, and what might be ugly is nevertheless of the same texture as everything else and clearly belongs in the tapestry. — Dean Koontz

I am glad that Zimbabwe and China speak the same language on many issues. We share the same conviction that only a fair, just, and non-prescriptive world order, based on the principles of the charter of the United Nations, can deliver the development we all need. — Robert Mugabe

Conservative policies have on the whole worked - insofar as any set of policies can be said to 'work' in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of. — Bill Kristol

Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith, honesty and industry. Don't take too much advice - keep at the helm and steer your own ship, and remember that the great art of commanding is to take a fair share of the work. Fire above the mark you intend to hit. Energy, invincible determination with the right motive, are the levers that move the world. — Noah Porter

The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn't spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life. — Jurgen Moltmann

O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!
... Or, if they have, where is my judgment fled,
That censures falsely what they see aright?
If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so?
If it be not, then love doth well denote
Love's eye is not so true as all men's 'No.'
How can it? O, how can Love's eye be true,
That is so vex'd with watching and with tears?
No marvel then, though I mistake my view;
The sun itself sees not till heaven clears.
O cunning Love! with tears thou keep'st me blind,
Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find.
- Shakespeare's Sonnet 148 — William Shakespeare

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. — William Shakespeare

Fair tax does not mean we don't want to encourage wealth creation. Wealth creation is how we raise the money to pay for world class schools and hospitals, for proper care of the weak, and dignity for the elderly. — Johann Lamont

For years now, the fake European 'left' is trying to portray European citizens as victims of the US imperialism. It is even trying to make the world feel sorry for those European workers who do not get a fair deal from their governments! It is thoroughly absurd. — Andre Vltchek

We live in a terrible world, "happiness" is defined by how lucky you are in society, let me say this; out of life experiences spanning throughout my 19-20 years of my life, I learned that life is unfair, but ironically, every time I TRY to do something right, it gets spit back in my f###### face. In short, even though it may sound depressing or negative, in life, it is desperately not fair, nothing will be happy or normal and if something happens that you thought shouldn't or cant, it's going to happen anyway, the truth is the truth, and the truth hurts, deal with it, and sometimes nothing will ever get better from there ever again, deal with it. — C.J. Butler

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl the fatherhood of God lies behind everything. This apparent chaotic world is not chaotic at all; if we step back and take it all in with the right perspective, we see that it is an intricately designed carnival ride. There is a fatherly purpose in it: it turns out that we thought we were being born into a world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but what was happening is that our Father was taking us to a particularly spectacular fair with some really gnarly rides. In — Douglas Wilson

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now — Sue Monk Kidd

DEMON MATH
What is JUST in a world
you've ripped in two
as if there could be
a half for me
a half for you
what is FAIR when
there is nothing
left to share
what is YOURS when
your pain is mine to bear
this sad math is mine
this mad path is mine
subtract they say
don't cry
back to the desk
try
forget addition
multiply
and i reply
this is why
remainders
hate
division. — Kami Garcia

Let us be adventurers for another world. It is at least a fair and noble chance; and there is nothing in this worth our thoughts or our passions. If we should be disappointed, we are still no worse than the rest of our fellow-mortals; and if we succeed in our expectations we are eternally happy. — Gilbert Burnet

I heard one preach a sermon on these words in the song, Song iv. 1, Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold, thou art fair. But at that time he made these two words, my love, his chief and subject matter: from which, after he had a little opened the text, he observed these several conclusions: 1. That the church, and so every saved soul, is Christ's love, when loveless. 2. Christ's love without a cause. 3. Christ's love, when hated of the world. 4. Christ's love, when under temptation and under destruction. 5. Christ's love, from first to last. 90. But I got nothing by what he said at present; only when he came to the application of the fourth particular, this was the word he said; If it be so, that the saved soul is Christ's love, when under temptation and desertion; then poor tempted soul, when thou art assaulted, and afflicted with temptations, and the hidings of God's face, yet think on these two words, 'My love,' still. — John Bunyan

I have devoted my whole life to Physical Culture. I shall devote the rest too for the same. I have seen the degradation in which we are at present. I have travelled extensively and all that I have remarked here is from experience; and my suggestions are to meet the situation. I know they would, if adapted remedy the evil; for, I have studied carefully the position. If we in all seriousness wish to call ourselves the descendants of the mighty Yoddhas of past, if we wish not to cast a blot on the fair name of India, if we wish that India should have a future vying with its glorious past, if we wish that we should gain an honorable and equal place among the peoples of the world it should be our sacred resolve from now to wake up from the sleep as a lion; we should muster muscle and steel the body. For all greatness lies in Culture and 1 should only be too gratified if my scheme could put the youth of the country on the right track to achieve our most cherished Ideals. — Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.
The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
"Visit to The World's Fair of 2014," The New York Times, August 1964 — Isaac Asimov

Few other griefs amid the ill chances of this world have more bitterness and shame for a man's heart than to behold the love of a lady so fair and brave that cannot be returned. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Sometimes, she wondered if what she craved even existed. A man who was strong inside and out. A man who knew the world wasn't fair, and knew he had to take responsibility for his part in it. A man who knew there was more to sex than simply the act and that there was more to a woman than breasts and thighs and what lay beyond. A man who accepted the fact that a woman might need adventure as well. That was what she craved. A man she could trust enough not just to give in to her desires with, but to accept her need to live. A man who, even if he wasn't there forever, was at least there long enough to care about fulfilling not just the physical desires, but the adventurous ones as well. — Lora Leigh

Despite having seen a fair amount of the world, I still love travelling - I just have an insatiable curiosity and like looking out of a window. — Michael Palin

I think it is fair to say that it is under a great deal of stress, and if I am asking for significant changes, it is because the world is going through significant changes. — Mohamed ElBaradei

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world. — James Buchan

I finally find a girl I could really be with, maybe the only girl in the world, and I had what? Two months with her? It's not enough. After everything she went through - everything I went through - we deserve more than that. Or maybe we don't. Anyway, life doesn't work like that. It doesn't care about fair and unfair. — Kendare Blake

At some point you cannot be the kid in the glass bubble in this world. You might've heard throughout your grade school and high school years that it was a safe, nice, warm, fair, feeling place ... but it can get brutal when it gets competitive. Especially when you succeed. Watch the detractors come out of the walls at that point. — Dennis Miller

Sweetie, in our world, fair's got nothing to do with anything. He who has the greatest power wins. It's why we're all willing to kill each other off without flinching. (Solin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

He cut her off with brutal precision. "And one last thing." His eyes
flicked toward the door, through which Jace, Alec, and Isabelle had
disappeared. "Keep in mind that when your mother fled from the Shadow World, it wasn't the monsters she was hiding from. Not the warlocks, the wolf-men, the Fair Folk, not even the demons themselves. It was them. It was the Shadowhunters. — Cassandra Clare

In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel. — Michael Schur

What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and call it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization ... But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair. — Paul Kearney

She was tired of being told how it was by this generation, who'd botched things so badly. They'd sold their children a pack of lies: God and country. Love your parents. All is fair. And then they'd sent those boys, her brother, off to fight a great monster of a war that maimed and killed and destroyed whatever was inside them. Still they lied, expecting her to mouth the words and play along. Well, she wouldn't. She knew now that the world was a long way from fair. She knew the monsters were real. — Libba Bray

Though this knave came something saucily into this world before he was sent for, yet was is mother Fair; there was good sport at his making, and the Whoreson must be acknowledged. — William Shakespeare

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor? — Bill Watterson

Never, I say, had a country so many openings to happiness as this ... Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm ... The remembrance then of what is past, if it operates rightly must inspire her with the most laudable of an ambition, that of adding to the fair fame she began with. The world has seen her great adversity ... Let then, the world see that she can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to the bravest virtue in time of war. — Thomas Paine

Will you have kids?"
"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."
"As a parent?"
"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."
"You'll find it's kind of tough to canvass the opinion of sperm."
"I prefer asking the eggs - they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"
"Exactly why decent people need to have kids. — Tom Rachman