Squicky Quotes & Sayings

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. — Mark John Thompson

Strangeness is the form taken by beauty when beauty has no hope. — Antoine Volodine

The song being great in its own wealth, why should it wait upon the words? Rather does it begin where mere words fail. Its power lies in the region of the inexpressible; it tells us what the words cannot. — Rabindranath Tagore

The problem, once again, as in all sciences is the attitude of the mind that is dealing with whatever field. The problem is not philosophy but the lack of intellectual humility. It is when reason becomes arrogant that we lose track. But intellectual humility with science: this is spirituality - this is the way we are with God. So we should not be scared and we must reconcile ourselves. — Tariq Ramadan

Trying to remember was like trying to catch the rain with her fingers. — George R R Martin

History does not care about the suffering of the individual. Only the outcome of their struggles. — Alison Goodman

Nick was giving me the same look. And this time,instead of being taken aback or feeling squicky about it,my heart raced and my face grew hot. My body's response to the call of Nick. — Jennifer Echols

From the 12th Congressional District Hopeful William Jefferson Clinton during the Nixon investigations.
I wanted to share some information I've turned up regarding two of your Clinton quotes. — Keith Richards

In addition to working as hard as men, women and girls were susceptible to sexual exploitation in ways and at rates that did not apply to men (the subject of males as victims of sexual assault has received little scholarly attention, with the exception of lynching and its attendant castration ritual). Absentee owners had to rely on managers and overseers, both white and black, who viewed sexual access as their right. Many enslaved children resulted from these unions; the question of how these interactions should be understood is a matter of debate. The rewards of voluntary cooperation could have included — Michael A. Gomez

A 50-year-old company can innovate as well as two guys/gals in a garage. — Guy Kawasaki

I try to get massages on Saturday. That's my only day off. — Brooke Elliott

Boys dream of strippers, men dream of their women waiting for them at home. — Kathleen Brooks

It seems hard to remain a bachelor ... to model your appearance and behaviour on one or two bachelors remembered from your youth.
That is how it will be, only that in reality it will be you yourself standing there, today and later, with a body and a real head, and so with a brow too, to strike with your hand. — Franz Kafka

Let me howl and die. — Ursula Andkjaer Olsen

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time. — Mark Twain

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire. — William Butler Yeats