Turchin Historical Dynamics Quotes & Sayings

To my hens, I'm a two-legged giant who throws them corn and keeps stealing their eggs. — David Mitchell

Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again. — Gautama Buddha

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. — Carl Sagan

We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and the future. — James A. Garfield

Wealthy people don't even pay taxes. But everybody must pay taxes. — Petter Stordalen

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied. — M.J. Rose

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge. — Cornelia Funke

I am trying to convince myself.. how much I hate you.. the way I convinced, how much I love you.. — Himmilicious

Kids think books are cool, especially when they see that people they think books are cool are reading. — Tyler Hilton

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist. — M.F.K. Fisher

I felt just the way I imagine the shade of poor old Samuel must have felt when the witch dragged him up from Sheol. "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes' sleep. — Marilynne Robinson

Happiness and sadness are just two eternal truths like day and night. A man of superior intellect is never affected by these emotions. They are not base emotions at all but a reflection of our thoughts, a reaction to our perspective on things we see, hear and do. Equanimity is not only desirable in a warrior, but a must. Without it, you are as good as dead in the battlefield. — Anand Neelakantan