Scalfari Claims Quotes & Sayings

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch! — Terry Pratchett

I have consumed more drink than the first
one hundred men you will pass
on the street
or meet in the madhouse.
I scratch my belly and dream of the
albatross.
I have joined the great drunks of
the centuries:
Li Po, Toulouse-Lautrec, Crane, Faulkner.
I have been selected
but by whom? — Charles Bukowski

There's no such thing as a 100-year flood. — Andrew Cuomo

I'd stopped trying to greet her ages ago. She was one of those people that didn't wave back. I'd never understood how you could do that, just ignore a wave or a greeting, but it seemed to be a consistent attribute for crazy people. I mean, how hard was it to stop pretending you didn't see anyone around you and just wave? Why wouldn't you want to be friendly in the most casual of waves with the people that lived next door to you? Because crazy. — R.K. Lilley

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics. — Pete Seeger

It contains some - not all, but some - of the things I want my daughters to know. And the greatest of these is love. please know that you had mine, unconditional, and powerful and awesome. So strong that I can't believe it will die with me. I want to imagine it as a living thing that goes beyond my body and my death, as a vine that has grown and wound its way through the very core of you all, and cannot be uprooted or destroyed, but rather will hold you erect when everything else is crumbling and withering inside you. — Elizabeth Noble

When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms. — T. D. Allman

Helen lifted the lid, her eyes widening as she discovered a treasure trove of caramels, jelly creams, candied fruit, toffees and marshmallow drops, all wrapped in twists of waxed paper. Her wondering gaze traveled to the nearby mountain of accumulating delicacies... smoked Wiltshire ham and collar bacon, a box of dry-cured salmon, pots of imported Danish butter, tinned sweetbreads, and a sack of fat glossed dates. There was a basket of hothouse fruits, wheels of Brie in papery white rinds, cunning little cheeses wrapped in netting jars of rich fig paste, pickled quail eggs, bottles of jewel-colored fruit liqueur meant to be sipped from tiny glasses, and a gold-colored tin of cocoa essence. — Lisa Kleypas