Spotlit Quotes & Sayings

When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Solzhenitsyn — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[He] ... watches the Joker rising from his wheelchair, the way a rabbit watches car headlights bearing down, unable to move a single, spotlit muscle. The madman's limbs appear to unlatch as though some psychotic god has chosen to give life to a complicated Swiss Army knife. The Joker's head rotates ... the green lasers of his eyes target the keys at the big man's belt, and he shakes his head. — Grant Morrison

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you. — Charles Dickens

Growth should take care of the fear of job losses. People will be challenged to do different things. For people who are not up to it, purely based on objective assessment, that's a different issue, which, you do it anyway. — Uday Kotak

I really wanted to support this campaign because I love heart shaped glasses. Seriously though, I've never hit anyone. I'm anti-violence full stop. Against women, against men, against animals. Against anything. — Max Rushden

I'm going to find ways to make you blush, just so I can enjoy the journey. — Mary J. Williams

The age of exploration is long over, amira. Now it's the age of globalization. And once everyone agrees something is one way, all the other ways it could have been disappear." I — Heidi Heilig

It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read. — Newt Gingrich

Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses. — Stephen Bayley

Incidentally, when we're faced with a "prove or disprove," we're usually better off trying first to disprove with a counterexample, for two reasons: A disproof is potentially easier (we need just one counterexample); and nitpicking arouses our creative juices. Even if the given assertion is true, our search for a counterexample often leads to a proof, as soon as we see why a counterexample is impossible. Besides, it's healthy to be skeptical. — Ronald Graham