Recordkeeping Quotes & Sayings

I wanted everybody to like me. I thought I was one shuck and jive away in every direction. — John Mayer

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us - which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire - a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous. — Alain De Botton

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology. — Paul Di Filippo

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity? — Karl Jacoby

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard. — Genghis Khan

I'm ashamed to say that getting behind the wheel of Dirk's shiny Penismobile was actually a lot of fun. — Emmett Spain