Pythonesque Quotes & Sayings

One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs. — Ayn Rand

Treasury remained something of a passive consumer of intelligence. Its intelligence office was little more than a message center that delivered packets of information from the intelligence community to offices in the Treasury. This was a nineteenth-century model in dire need of an update for the twenty-first century. Together with — Juan Zarate

We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude - looking at a fruit without eating it - must be what saves. — Simone Weil

Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: We're All Individuals! — Jonah Goldberg

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem. — Nicholson Baker

Jesus, I could shake the crap out of you.' Gabriel shoved him in the shoulder. 'When you're going to do awesome stuff, let me in on it. — Brigid Kemmerer

The highest virtue seems as low as a valley. — Laozi