Quotes & Sayings About The Leviathan

I feel like my life is so scattered right now. like it's all these small pieces of paper and someone's turned on the fan. but talking to you makes me feel like the fan's been turned off for a little bit. like things could actually make sense. you completely unscatter me, and i appreciate that so much. — David Levithan

In their infinite wisdom, the Admiralty approved Alek's medal for bravery in the air on the very same day the United States entered the war.
The timing seemed suspicious to Deryn, and of course the medal wasn't for anything useful, like shutting down Tesla's weapon to save the Leviathan. Instead Alek was to be decorated for blundering about on the ship's topside during a storm, and for his great skill in falling over and knocking himself silly. That was the Admiralty for you. — Scott Westerfeld

There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night. — Robert Charles Wilson

An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation. — Andre Malraux

Directly above the starboard engine room, it was also in a state of almost constant vibration, the noise juddering away below their feet with an awesome, leviathan constancy. — Jojo Moyes

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake. — Rick Perlstein

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. - HOBBES, Leviathan — Neal Stephenson

It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. — Ray Bradbury

For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery - that most unstable existential moment - the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. — Richard Rhodes

The desert to us is tohu wabohu, a place of chaos that is unformed and unfilled. When we crossed the Red Sea, Yahweh had promised us that he would crush the heads of Leviathan and Rahab and create the heavens and the earth out of the chaos. This was another way of saying that Yahweh would establish his kingdom covenant order out of the disorder and lawlessness that was Canaan. Sending the goat out into the desert to Azazel, was not an offering to the damnable goat demon, but rather it was a banishment of Israel's sin to the realm of chaos outside Yahweh's kingdom - the same realm of Azazel. — Brian Godawa

He believed in it, as certain good women believe in the leviathan-by faith, not by reason. — Jules Verne

Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he (Kierkegaard) pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise. — Malcolm Muggeridge

(Economist Robert Higgs wrote a book about this phenomenon titled Crisis and Leviathan, in which he argues that government intervention inevitably creates future problems, which results in the government's intervening even more in an attempt to correct them.) — Glenn Beck

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled. — Sonya Hartnett

Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better. — John Micklethwait

This is a book about texts as well as their authors, it is not a textbook so much as a context book and a pretext book, concerned with settings and motives as well as the works themselves. Its success will be measured by the readers who pick up Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and find themselves engrossed rather than baffled - and even when they are baffled, are happy to go on reading, interrogating, and arguing with their authors for themselves. — Alan Ryan

The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state. — Donald Phillip Verene

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan. — Dan Simmons

On Earth, Discord! A gloomy Heaven above, opening her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And below, an inescapable & inexorable Hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of Mortals! — Robert Burns

Christians can disagree about public policy in good faith, and a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim to be living out the gospel. But the Christian libertarian has a particular obligation to recognize those places where libertarianism's emphasis on freedom can shade into an un-Christian worship of the individual. Likewise the Christian liberal: even as he supports government interventions to assist the poor and dispossessed, he should be constantly on guard against the tendency to deify Leviathan and wary of the ways that government power can easily be turned to inhuman and immoral ends.
In the contemporary United States, a host of factors - from the salience of issues like abortion to the anti-Christian biases of our largely left-wing intelligentsia - ensure that many orthodox Christians feel more comfortable affiliating with the Republican Party than with the Democrats. But this comfort should not blind Christians to the GOP's flaws. — Ross Douthat

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. — Herman Melville

["Love is the love of one {singularly,} with desire to be singularly beloved." - Hobbes{Leviathan, (1651), Part I, Chapter VI}.] — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Welcome to the age of paper money, where governments and central banks can manufacture as much money as they want without limit. Gold was the last limit. Its banishment as a standard unleashed the inflation monster and leviathan itself, which has swelled beyond comprehension. — Llewellyn Rockwell

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. — Lydia Millet

Leviathan is not the biggest fish; - I have heard of Krakens. — Herman Melville

Drawing up her spear, Ellemist lunged towards the mighty leviathan. — Muse

Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand. — Ron Paul

When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of technology, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side. Then we realize we that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone - a call of destiny.
This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can only be impressed by large quantities - chiefly when they are in motion - and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan. — Ernst Junger

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; — Thomas Hobbes

This understanding floats on the surface of Jija's mind for the rest of the day after Renthree leaves. The truth is beneath the surface, a Leviathan waiting to uncurl, but the waters of his thoughts are placid for now. Denial is powerful. — N.K. Jemisin

And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. — Herman Melville

Leviathan laughs at the javelin, but he trembles at prayer. Sword and spear need furbishing, but prayer never rusts, and when we think it most blunt it cuts the best. Prayer is an open door which none can shut. Devils may surround you on all sides, but the way upward is always open. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil *was* oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale Phil's manifold applications: 'It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.' In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age
NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986. — Sarah Vowell

Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves. — Lewis Mumford

Nature indeed plants the seeds of religion--fear and ignorance; kingcraft and priestcraft water and tend it. — W.G. Pogson Smith

It's the libertarians who want to reclaim decision-making for themselves. It's the small government folks who see government as a great Leviathan gobbling up more and more of their treasure and freedoms. — Kathleen Troia McFarland

In the quagmire of feelings and emotions that engulf us on our drab and monotonous days and starry, resplendent nights, the ones that bring back past memories hold a special place, almost a unique pedestal, in our hearts! The distinct fragrance of nostalgia that serenades us in our minds is incomparable and is akin to a feeling of ecstasy. A feeling that hovers in our minds for a humongous period of time, one that takes us to leviathan heights in the midst of chaos and cacophony. It is as if we found a new elixir that rejuvenates us and makes us spring back into life. — Avijeet Das

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics. — Ronald Carter

The terror-the terror, the terror-lingered, and there was something else. It came with the dream, every time, and didn't recede with it but stayed like something a tide had washed in. Something awful-a rank leviathan corpse left to rot on the shore of her mind. It was remorse. But god, that was too bloodless a word for it,. This feeling the dream left her with, it was knives of panic and horror resting bright atop a red and meaty wound-fester of guilt. — Laini Taylor

Sandel hankers for the muscular debates of yesteryear, when government was not big but had bigger ambitions than today's bland Leviathan has. — George F. Will

In the belly of Leviathan, Mr Thomas, one can either despair and perish, or be cheerful and persevere. — Dean Koontz

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them. — Samantha Shannon

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream. — Jocelyn Gibb

There is no denying that Snowden's dramatic disclosures, despite the damage they did to U.S. intelligence, accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and the government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan." (p.299) — Edward Jay Epstein

Income taxes are responsible for the transformation of the Federal government from one of limited powers into a vast leviathan whose tentacles reach into almost every aspect of American life. — Ron Paul

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. — Jeff VanderMeer

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. — Herman Melville

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side. — Alan Ryan

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned. — Steven Pinker

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.
Has it? — Dan Simmons

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. — Henry Miller

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and ... try freedom. — Murray Rothbard

I think Americans such as Leviathan have done a lot to expand the sonic palette of black metal. — Colin Marston

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented. — Steven Pinker

Scorpius to Crichton "I know you're living on a stolen Leviathan with escaped prisoners, and I know that Leviathan is pregnant." "You know who the daddy is? — Paul Simpson

Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail 'round the high-pooped galleys ... Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. — Oscar Wilde

Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war. — Steven Pinker

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion. — Thomas Hobbes

Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. — Herman Melville

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us. — Scott Westerfeld

There was a low growling sound and the Munstermobile came gliding up out of the parking garage, dripping water from its gleaming surface like some lantern-eyed leviathan rising from the depths. There were still a few dents and dings in it, but the broken glass had all been replaced, and the engine sounded fine.
Okay, I'm not like a car fanatic or anything - but the guitar riff from "Bad to the Bone" started playing in my head. — Jim Butcher

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child. — E. M. Forster

Sprinkled across the black waters below were at least a hundred small boats set out to greet the Leviathan, their navigation lights like shifting stars. Among them loomed a glittering cruise liner, her fog horn bellowing in the night. The low groan grew into a chorus as the other great ships in the harbor joined in.
Perched on Volger's desk, Bovril attempted to imitate the horns, but wound up sounding like a badly blown tuba.
Alek smiled. "But they're already singing our praises!"
"They are Americans," Volger said. "They toot their horns for anything. — Scott Westerfeld

The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan ... — Rosita Forbes

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For — Henry Hitchings

Satan rose to his feet and stood massive and malevolent, his head almost lost in the reeking clouds. Behind him, the floor shivered and shattered as his generals, princes and barons rose behind him: Balberith, Beelzebub and Carreau; Melmoroth, Shakarl and Mr Runcible; Olivier, Leviathan and Yog-Sothoth who just happened to be there because he couldn't help it. — Jonathan L. Howard

The leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world - nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters - can and is happening here at home. — Llewellyn Rockwell

You young things are too easily persuaded by the touch of lips. — Scott Westerfeld

That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."
"That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said ... — Michael Chabon

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. — Paul Auster

Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Hobbes's distrust for the individual with his confidence in the altruistic nature of the individual or individuals who will oversee and control the Leviathan. Are not the latter also of flesh and blood? Hobbes seems to be saying that man's nature cannot be trusted but the nature of a ruler or a ruling assembly of men can be trusted. How so? — Mark R. Levin

Sing to me in the language of leviathan, that I may know his name. — George R R Martin

Summation of Leviathan: "The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism." — Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper