Preselectii Quotes & Sayings

I work in a medium where I get to be totally invisible and I get great pleasure from that, being a pretty self-conscious person. — Terry Gross

When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government. — Baron De Montesquieu

Hello, tiny life-form of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself ? That the universe is the shape of a doughnut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the tip of your tail? — David Mitchell

God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire — William S. Burroughs

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like 'thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne', caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment. — Catharine Arnold