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Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (April 22, 1707 – October 8, 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humor and satirical prowess and as the author of the novel Tom Jones.

Quotes

 * Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
 * ''Don Quixote in England (1731), Act I, scene vi

 * Oons, sir! do you say that I am drunk? I say, sir, that I am as sober as a judge.
 * Don Quixote in England (1731), Act III, scene xiv

 * A crime, which, though perhaps not considered by law as the highest, is in truth and in fact, the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man.
 * Fielding, Henry; ed. by William Ernest Henley. 1903. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq: Miscellaneous writings. W. Heinemann. p. 162

 * Oh, the roast beef of England, And old England's roast beef!
 * The Grub Street Opera (1731), Act iii, scene 2; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

 * Much may be said on both sides.
 * The Covent Garden Tragedy (1732), Act I, scene vii

 * Enough is equal to a feast.
 * The Covent Garden Tragedy (1732), Act V, scene 1

 * The dusky night rides down the sky, And ushers in the morn; The hounds all join in glorious cry, The huntsman winds his horn, And a-hunting we will go.
 * A-Hunting We Will Go (1734), st. 1

 * Depend on me; never fear your enemies. I'll warrant we make more noise than they.
 * Eurydice Hissed : or A Word to the Wise (1736) in The Works of Henry Fielding (1775) in Twelve Volumes, Vol. IV, p. 222

 * He in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.
 * Jonathan Wild (1743, rev. 1754), Book III, ch. 7

 * Illustrious predecessors.
 * Covent Garden Journal (11 January 1752)

 * "For it is very hard, my lord," said a convicted felon at the bar to the late excellent judge Burnet, "to hang a poor man for stealing a horse." "You are not to be hanged sir," answered my ever-honored and beloved friend, "for stealing a horse, but you are to be hanged that horses may not be stolen."
 * The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1754), Introduction

 * This story will not go down.
 * Tumble-down Dick; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love in Several Masques (1728)

 * A lover, when he is admitted to cards, ought to be solemnly silent, and observe the motions of his mistress. He must laugh when she laughs, sigh when she sighs. In short, he should be the shadow of her mind. A lady, in the presence of her lover, should never want a looking-glass; as a beau, in the presence of his looking-glass, never wants a mistress.
 * Act II, sc. xi

 * Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.
 * Act III, sc. vii

 * Love and scandal are the best sweeteneers of tea.
 * Act IV, sc. xi

Tom Thumb the Great (1730)

 * All Nature wears one universal grin.
 * Act I, sc. i

 * Petition me no petitions, sir, to-day; Let other hours be set apart for business. Today it is our pleasure to be drunk; And this our queen shall be as drunk as we.
 * Act I, sc. ii

 * When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough; I've done my duty, and I've done no more.
 * Act I, sc. iii

 * Thy modesty's a candle to thy merit.
 * Act I, sc. iii

 * To sun myself in Huncamunca's eyes.
 * Act I, sc. iii

 * Lo, when two dogs are fighting in the streets, With a third dog one of the two dogs meets; With angry teeth he bites him to the bone, And this dog smarts for what that dog has done.
 * Act I, sc. vi

The Miser (1733)

 * We must eat to live and live to eat.
 * Act III, sc. iii

 * Sir, money, money, the most charming of all things; money, which will say more in one moment than the most elegant lover can in years. Perhaps you will say a man is not young; I answer he is rich. He is not genteel, handsome, witty, brave, good-humoured, but he is rich, rich, rich, rich, rich — that one word contradicts everything you can say against him.
 * Act III, sc. vii

 * Penny saved is a penny got.
 * Act III, sc. xii

Joseph Andrews (1742)

 * A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.
 * Author's Preface

 * The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation
 * Author's Preface

 * It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.
 * Book I, Ch. 1

 * To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.
 * Book II, Ch. 8

 * I am content; that is a blessing greater than riches; and he to whom that is given need ask no more.
 * Book II, Ch. 14

 * I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.
 * Book III, Ch. 1

 * They are the affectation of affectation.
 * Book III, Ch. 3

 * I have found it; I have discovered the cause of all the misfortunes which befell him. A public school, Joseph, was the cause of all the calamaties which he afterwards suffered. Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.
 * Abraham Adams, speaking of his host, Wilson.
 * Book III, Ch. 5

 * Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
 * Book IV, Ch. 6

The History of Tom Jones (1749)

 * Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates
 * Book I, Chapter 1

 * The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part,and some of his limbs gibbeted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town.
 * Book I, Chapter 1

 * ...the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author's skill in well dressing it up.
 * Book I, Chapter 1

 * Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic..."
 * Book I, Chapter 2

 * ...for nothing can be more reasonable, than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them, which they themselves pay to all above them.
 * Book I, Chapter 6

 * Every physician almost hath his favorite disease.
 * Book II, Ch. 9

 * Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.
 * Book III, Ch. 10

 * Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?
 * Book IV, Ch. 4

 * In reality, the world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.
 * Book V, ch. 1

 * He was, indeed, in a condition, in which, if reason had interposed, though only to advise, she might have received the answer which one Cleostratus gave many years ago to a silly fellow, who asked him, if he was not ashamed to be drunk? "Are not you," said Cleostratus, "ashamed to admonish a drunken man?" — To say the truth, in a court of justice drunkenness must not be an excuse, yet in a court of conscience it is greatly so.
 * Book V, Ch. 10

 * Distinction without a difference.
 * Book VI, Ch. 13

 * Amiable weakness.
 * Book X, Chapter 8

 * The dignity of history.
 * Book XI, Chapter 2

 * His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.
 * Book XI, Ch. 4

 * Hairbreadth missings of happiness look like the insults of Fortune.
 * Book XIII, Ch. 2

 * Republic of letters.
 * Book XIV, Chapter 1

 * When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.
 * Book XV, Ch. 2

Amelia (1751)

 * To speak a bold truth, I am, after much mature deliberation, inclined to suspect that the public voice hath, in all ages, done much injustice to Fortune, and hath convicted her of many facts in which she had not the least concern.
 * Book I, Ch. 1

 * Life may as properly be called an art as any other.
 * Book I, Ch. 1

 * It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible.
 * Book III, Ch. 4

 * Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.
 * Book III, ch. 11

 * These are called the pious frauds of friendship.
 * Book VI, Ch. 6

 * When widows exclaim loudly against second marriages, I would always lay a wager that the man, if not the wedding day, is absolutely fixed on.
 * Book VI, Ch. 8

 * One fool at least in every married couple.
 * Book IX, ch. 4

 * A good face, they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World?
 * Book IX, ch. 5

 * There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
 * Book IX, Ch. 10

Unsourced

 * Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.

Quotes about Fielding

 * There is no dull chapter. But he makes the hero too good. He seems to think that so long as Tom goes for a little miscellaneous fornication he will be saved from priggishness. I doubt if this is so, especially at the end, where Tom's angelicalness upon the misfortunes of Blifil is really a bit thick.
 * Arnold Bennett, Journal for 19 August 1911, in The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. F. Swinnerton (1954)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Henry Fielding


text:
Popeye

Popeye is the lead character from the Thimble Theatre comic strip. Since 1933, he has been adapted into several other media, including theatrical animated shorts, animated television series, radio programs, feature films, and more.

 * (Castor Oyl: You there, are you a sailor?) "Ja' think I'm a cowboy?" - Popeye's first line in the comic strip, therefore his first line in any medium. Quoted in Popeye: An Illustrated Cultural History by Fred Grandinetti, McFarland, 2004 (p. 3).
 * I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam." -- Popeye the Sailor
 * Well blow me down! -- Popeye
 * "That's all I can stands, cuz I can't stands n'more!" - Popeye
 * I'm strong to the finach, 'cause I eats me Spinach, I'm Popeye the sailor man! (toot, toot) - Popeye (from theme song)
 * Olive Oyl says that she don't want to be with no unedumacated ignoramousk. So I'll be an EDUMACATED ignoramousk! (and he enrolls) - Popeye
 * I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. - J. Wellington Wimpy
 * Let's you and him fight. - J. Wellington Wimpy
 * Help, Popeye! Save me! (among other variations) --Olive Oyl
 * You keep your hands to you, that's what you are! --Olive Oyl
 * Don't you DARE 'reproach' me! --Olive Oyl (she means to say "approach")
 * Oh, Popeye! --Olive Oyl
 * I'll take you all on one at a time!
 * Where's the entrance to the exit?
 * Oh yeah? WHAM! (from the earlier cartoons)
 * A-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah! (Popeye's laugh)

title: Popeye


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Vermont

Vermont is a U.S. state located in New England. The state ranks 43rd in land area (9,250 sq mi), is the most rural, and its population (608,827) ranks as the second smallest of the 50 states. As the only New England state with no coastline along the Atlantic Ocean, Vermont is notable for the Green Mountains in the west and Lake Champlain in the northwest.

Quotes

 * Freedom and Unity
 * Vermont State Motto.

 * The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it.
 * Ethan Allen, in reply to the King's attorney-general, in a New York court case decided against him, prior to his armed resistance to claims of New York authority over Vermont; quoted in Curiosities of Human Nature (1844) by Samuel Griswold Goodrich, p. 145.

 * (See "New Hampshire.")
 * Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991), New York: Fawcett Columbine, p. 98

 * Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield, and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here that I received my bride; here my dead lie, pillowed on the loving breast of our everlasting hills. I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.
 * Speech by president Calvin Coolidge at Bennington, Vermont (21 September 1928).

 * Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference.
 * Fred Rogers, Commencement Address at Middlebury College (May 2001).

 * I am Vermont.
 * Valerie Frankel, "Runway To The White House: Searching for a Defining Look In the Land of Ben & Jerry's", New York Times, August 31, 2003.

 * Had West Virginia been nothing more than a mountainous bulwark around which rushed the main currents of American life, its fate would probably have resembled that of Vermont. In fact, Rutherford B. Hayes made this comparison and concluded that there was "Nothing finer in Vermont or New Hampshire" than the western Virginia scenery he enjoyed. If the resemblance had continued to hold, West Virginia would have remained a backwater during the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century but still would have enjoyed two compensating mid-twentieth-century trends: the federal policies and programs that have worked to iron out differences in material standards of living among the various states, and the rise of tourist and recreational industries. Even today, notwithstanding all the violence that has been visited on the landscape, West Virginia's scenery and the recreational potential of its mountains, forests, and streams have proved its most enduring economic resources. Thus for states like Vermont and for those small portions of eastern West Virginia that have nothing but scenery to depend on, modern affluence and aesthetic values may finally break down the barriers that once separated mountain regions from full participation in the nation's economic life.
 * John Alexander Williams, West Virginia: A History (1976), p. 200

title: Vermont


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Pericles

Pericles (Greek: Περικλῆς; ca. 495 BC – 429 BC) was an influential and important leader of Athens during the Athenian Golden Age (specifically, between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars), from the Alcmaeonidae family. The period from 461 BC to 379 BC is sometimes known as "The Age of Pericles."

Quotes

 * Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.
 * From Plutarch, Lives, Pericles, sec. 18. See also the following source provided by the "1000 Quotes Project": Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives, Vol 3. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. The Macmillan Co: New York. 1916. Pg 59 or 60. Archived from the original on November 10, 2022. The aforementioned source is available online as The Parallel Lives by Plutarch published in Vol. III of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1916.

 * Trees, though they are cut and lopped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.
 * From Plutarch, Lives, Pericles, 33

 * The whole Earth is the Sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on Stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.
 * As quoted in A Brief and True Report concerning Williamsburg in Virginia by Rutherford Goodwin (1941), p. 125

 * Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
 * As quoted in Homage to Greece (1943)

 * Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but the estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true.
 * As quoted in Eternal Greece (1961) by Rex Warner, p. 34

 * Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.
 * As quoted in The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper (1966). Book II, chapter 40.

 * What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
 * As quoted in Flicker to Flame : Living with Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness (2006) by Jeffrey Thompson Parker, p. 118
 * This quotation is likely a modern paraphrasing of a longer passage from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, II.43.3.

 * We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
 * Pericles commenting the participation of Athenian citizens in politics, as quoted in Models of Democracy (2006) by David Held, Stanford University Press, p. 14. Book II, chapter 40.

History of the Peloponnesian War

 * Quotes of Pericles, as recorded by Thucydides, in the History of the Peloponnesian War

 * Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves
 * 2.37
 * Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it, the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.
 * Book 2.40

 * Hatred and unpopularity at the moment have fallen to the lot of all who have aspired to rule others; but where odium must be incurred, true wisdom incurs it for the highest objects. Hatred also is short-lived; but that which makes the splendour of the present and the glory of the future remains for ever unforgotten. Make your decision, therefore, for glory then and honour now, and attain both objects by instant and zealous effort: do not send heralds to Lacedaemon, and do not betray any sign of being oppressed by your present sufferings, since they whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.
 * Book 2

 * I could tell you a long story (and you know it as well as I do) about what is to be gained by beating the enemy back. What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she realty is, and should fall in love with her. When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. If they ever failed in an enterprise, they made up their minds that at any rate the city should not find their courage lacking to her, and they gave to her the best contribution that they could. They gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchers — not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men's minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
 * Book 2, chapter 44: Funeral oration, as translated at "In Defense of Democracy"
 * Verse 4 is sometimes freely translated as The secret to happiness is freedom. And the secret to freedom is courage.

 * Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire … Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.
 * Book 2, chapter 63: Pericles' third speech
 * This verse is sometimes freely translated as Empires are dangerous things to possess for, once you have them, it is very difficult to let them go.

 * But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.
 * Pericles' Funeral Oration

 * Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
 * As translated by Richard Crawley (1951)

title: Pericles


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Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the Doctor Angelicus, the Doctor Communis, and the Doctor Universalis. The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. Among other things, he was a prominent proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought (encompassing both theology and philosophy) known as Thomism. He argued that God is the source of both the light of natural reason and the light of faith. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy is derived from his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.

 * See also: Summa Theologica, Five Ways (Aquinas)

Quotes

 * Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium Sanguinisque pretiosi, Quem in mundi pretium Fructus ventris generosi Rex effudit gentium.
 * Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory, Of His Flesh the mystery sing; Of the Blood, all price exceeding, Shed by our immortal King.
 * Pange, Lingua (hymn for Vespers on the Feast of Corpus Christi), stanza 1

 * Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail.
 * Pange, Lingua, stanza 5 (Tantum Ergo)

 * Thus Angels' Bread is made The Bread of man today: The Living Bread from Heaven With figures doth away: O wondrous gift indeed! The poor and lowly may Upon their Lord and Master feed.
 * Sacris Solemniis Juncta Sint Gaudia (Matins hymn for Corpus Christi), stanza 6 (Panis Angelicus)

 * O saving Victim, opening wide The gate of heaven to man below, Our foes press on from every side, Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.
 * Verbum Supernum Prodiens (hymn for Lauds on Corpus Christi), stanza 5 (O Salutaris Hostia)

 * Anything done against faith or conscience is sinful.
 * Commentary on Romans, cap 14, I 3

 * Reason in man is rather like God in the world.
 * Opuscule II, De Regno (On Kingship, c. 1267)

 * Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship.
 * Quaestiones disputatae: De caritate (Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270)

 * It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.
 * Quaestiones disputatae: De caritate (Disputed Questions: On Charity, c. 1270)

 * The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.
 * Commentary on the Metaphysics (c. 1270–1272), 1, 3; quoted in Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York, 1952), p. 88

 * If … the motion of the earth were circular, it would be violent and contrary to nature, and could not be eternal, since … nothing violent is eternal.… It follows, therefore, that the earth is not moved with a circular motion.
 * Commentaria in libros Aristotelis de caelo et mundo (Commentary on Aristotle's On the Heavens, c. 1272–1273)

 * A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
 * Commentary on the Psalms (c. 1273), Introduction

 * Omne verum a quocumque dicatur a Spiritu Sancto est.
 * All that is true, from anyone it is said, always comes from the Holy Spirit.
 * Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 109, a. 1, ad 1

 * Raynalde, non possum, quia omnia quae scripsi videntur mihi palae. Replying to Reginald of Piperno: Videntur mihi palae respectu eorum quae vidi et revelata sunt mihi.
 * Processus, n. 79, 376
 * All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.
 * Reply to Reginald of Piperno after being asked to resume writing "Summa Theologiae" (then left unfinished), after a mystical experience while saying mass on or about 6 December 1273, as quoted in "The Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Biographical Documents" (1959) by Kenelm Foster, O.P.
 * Variant translations:
 * All that I have written seems like straw to me.
 * As quoted in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993), by Brian Davies, p. 9
 * Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.
 * As quoted in Sacred Games : A History of Christian Worship (1997) by Bernhard Lang, p. 323
 * All that I have written seems to me so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.
 * As quoted in A Treasury of Quotations on the Spiritual Life from the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church (2007) by John P. McClernon
 * All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.
 * As quoted in Higher Reality Therapy: Nine Pathways to Inner Peace (2010) by Anthony Falikowski, p. 38

 * Jesus Christ: Bene scripsísti de me, Thoma; quam ergo mercédem accípies? Aquinas: Non áliam, Dómine, nisi teípsum.
 * Jesus Christ: "You wrote correctly about me, Thomas. What prize do you want to have?" Aquinas: "Nothing, my Lord, except for Yourself."
 * Lect. V- II Noct.

 * Anima mea non est ego.
 * '''I am not my soul.
 * Super I ad Corinthios, 15.2

Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1254–1256)

 * The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it. There are two ways in which the first may occur. Either because of a defect in the person, if he is unworthy; or because of some defect in the way itself by which power was acquired, if, for example, through violence, or simony or some other illegal method.
 * in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183

 * With regard to the abuse of authority, this also may come about in two ways. First, when what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted (if, for example, some sinful action is commanded or one which is contrary to virtue, when it is precisely for the protection and fostering of virtue that authority is instituted). In such a case, not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants. Secondly, when those who bear such authority command things which exceed the competence of such authority; as, for example, when a master demands payment from a servant which the latter is not bound to make, and other similar cases. In this instance the subject is free to obey or disobey.
 * in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings (Basil Blackwell: 1974), p. 183

 * One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded.
 * Trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329-30

De veritate (c. 1256–1259)
Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (Disputed Questions on Truth)
 * The greatness of the human being consists in this: that it is capable of the universe.
 * q. 1, art. 2, ad 4

 * Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
 * q. 2, art. 3, arg. 19
 * This is known as the Peripatetic axiom.

 * We can open our hearts to God, but only with Divine help.
 * q. 24, art. 15, ad 2

Summa contra Gentiles (1259–1265)

 * Truth is the ultimate end of the whole universe.
 * I, 1, 2

 * Muhammad seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning, Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.
 * I, 6, 4 (trans. Anton C. Pegis)

 * For creation is not a change, but that dependence of the created existence on the principle from which it is instituted, and thus is of the genus of relation; whence nothing prohibits it being in the created as in the subject. Creation is thus said to be a kind of change, according to the way of understanding, insofar as our intellect accepts one and the same thing as not existing before and afterwards existing.
 * II, 18, 2 (see also Summa Theologica I, q. 45, art. 3 ad 2)

 * The perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by Him obtain perfection from Him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.
 * III, 69, 15

 * Natural inclinations are present in things from God, who moves all things. So it is impossible for the natural inclinations of a species to be toward evil in itself. But there is in all perfect animals a natural inclination toward carnal union. Therefore it is impossible for carnal union to be evil in itself.
 * III, 126, 3

 * The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.
 * III, 130, 3

On the Governance of the Jews (c. 1263–1265)
De regimine Judaeorum (On the Governance of the Jews), aka Epistola ad ducissam Brabantiae (Letter to the Duchess of Brabant). In this letter Aquinas answers eight questions asked by the Duchess, five of which were about the Jews.
 * Since the Jews may not licitly keep those things which they have extorted from others through usury, the consequence is also that if you [rulers] receive these things from them, neither may you licitly keep them.[…] You should restore them to those to whom the Jews themselves are morally bound to make restitution.
 * art. 1

 * It would be better if they [rulers] compelled the Jews to work for their living, as they do in parts of Italy, than that, living without occupation, they can grow rich only by usury (solis usuris ditentur).
 * art. 2

 * Now what has been said about the Jews is also to be understood about Cahorsins, and anyone else depending upon the depravity of usury.
 * art. 4

De potentia (c. 1265–1266)
Quaestiones disputatae de potentia (Disputed Questions on Power)
 * It is on account neither of God's weakness nor ignorance that evil comes into the world, but rather it is due to the order of his wisdom and the greatness of his goodness that diverse grades of goodness occur in things, many of which would be lacking if no evil were permitted. Indeed, the good of patience would not exist without the evil of persecution; nor the good of preservation of life in a lion if not for the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.
 * q. 3, art. 6, ad 4

 * Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.
 * q. 7, art. 5, ad 14

 * There is no order between created being and non-being, but there is between created and uncreated being.
 * q. 7, art. 9, ad 8

On The Perfection of the Spiritual Life (1269-1270)

 * Vita enim in hoc maxime manifestatur quod aliquid movet se ipsum; quod autem non potest moveri nisi ab alio, quasi mortuum esse videtur.
 * The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A being that is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.
 * Variant translation: Now slavery has a certain likeness to death, hence it is also called civil death. For life is most evident in a thing's moving itself, while what can only be moved by another, seems to be as if dead. But it is manifest that a slave is not moved by himself, but only at his master's command.
 * Chapter 14

On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273)
Sermons on the Ten Commandments (Collationes in decem praeceptes)
 * Tria sunt homini necessaria ad salutem: scilicit scientia credendorum, scientia desiderandorum, et scientia operandorum.
 * Three things are necessary for man to be saved: knowledge of what is to be believed, knowledge of what is to be desired, and knowledge of what is to be done.
 * Prologue (opening sentence)
 * Variant translation: Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

 * Lex naturae […] nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectis insitum nobis a Deo, per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum. Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione.
 * The law of nature […] is nothing other than the light of the intellect planted in us by God, by which we know what should be done and what should be avoided. God gave us this light or law in creation.
 * Art. 1

 * Nullum malum bona intentione factum excusatur.
 * No evil can be excused because it is done with a good intention.
 * Art. 1
 * Variant translation: An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention.

On the Apostles' Creed (c. 1273)

 * If man of himself could in a perfect manner know all things visible and invisible, it would indeed be foolish to believe what he does not see. But our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.
 * Prologue (trans. Joseph B. Collins)

 * Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more they penetrated within. Doubtless, such a person would believe there was a fire in the house, even though they did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: one will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.
 * Art. 1

 * Now, as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit.
 * Art. 8

Disputed

 * Hominem unius libri timeo
 * I fear the man of a single book.
 * As quoted by Leonard Sweet, The Greatest Story Never Told, section: "The Gift of Lyrics", Abingdon Press, 2012
 * Variant: "Beware the man of one book."
 * See also: Homo unius libri

Misattributed

 * Prostitution in towns is like the sewer in a palace; take away the sewers and the palace becomes an impure and stinking place.
 * This quote, frequently attributed to Aquinas, is actually a paraphrase of a passage (itself an elaborate paraphrase of Augustine) by Ptolemy of Lucca in his continuation of an unfinished work by Aquinas. The passage from Ptolemy reads: "Thus, Augustine says that a whore acts in the world as the bilge in a ship or the sewer in a palace: 'Remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with a stench.' Similarly, concerning the bilge, he says: 'Take away whores from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.'" (Ptolemy of Lucca and Thomas Aquinas, On the Government of Rulers, trans. James M. Blythe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 4. 14. 6). What Augustine actually wrote (in De ordine, 2. 4. 12) was simply: "Remove prostitutes from human affairs and you will unsettle everything on account of lusts." Only Book 1 and the first four chapters of Book 2 of On the Government of Rulers (De Regimine Principum) are by Aquinas. The rest of the work was written by Ptolemy. (It even mentions the coronation of Albert I of Hapsburg, an event that occurred in 1298, twenty-four years after Aquinas's death.) The quote comes from Book 4, which was definitely not written by Aquinas.

Quotes about Aquinas

 * This dumb ox will fill the world with his bellowing.
 * Albertus Magnus, in response to other of his students calling Thomas a "dumb ox" because of his quietude, as quoted in The Great Ages of Western Philosophy : The Age of Belief : The Medieval Philosophers (1962) by Anne Jackson Fremantle

 * Pope John XXII about the Summa Theologiae: As many articles as miracles.
 * Quote articula, tot miracula.
 * Relics of Saint Thomas Aquinas Displayed for the First Time Since 1369 (February 27, 2023)

 * O excellent Thomas would that you had not been born in the West such that you would have need to advocate the differences of that [Roman] Church! You were influenced by it with regard to both the procession of the Holy Spirit as well as by the difference with respect to the divine essence and energy. For surely, then, you would have been infallible in your theological doctrines, just as you are so too inerrant in these matters of ethics!
 * Gennadios Scholarius, Résumé de la Prima Secundae de la Somme théologique de sanit Thomas d'Aquin, in Oeuvres Completes de Georges Scholarios 5, ed. L. Petit -X. Siderides -M. Jugie, Paris, Maison de la Bonne Presse 1933

 * We have, among innumerable other works, the Summa theologica, surely one of the most amazing and stupendous products of the human mind. ...never before or since has the wide world been so neatly boxed and compassed, so completely and confidently understood, every detail of it fitted, with such subtle and loving precision, into a consistent and convincing whole.
 * Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932)

 * The difficulty of dealing with St. Thomas Aquinas in this brief article is the difficulty of selecting that aspect of a many-sided mind which will best suggest its size or scale. Because of the massive body which carried his massive brain, he was called "The Ox"; but any attempt to boil down such a brain into tabloid literature passes all possible jokes about an ox in a teacup. He was one of the two or three giants; one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived; and I should never be surprised if he turned out, quite apart from sanctity, to be the greatest of all. Another way of putting the problem is to say that proportion alters according to what other men we are at the moment classing him with or pitting him against. We do not get the scale until we come to the few men in history who can be his rivals.
 * G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)

 * St. Thomas confronts other creeds of good and evil, without at all denying evil, with a theory of two levels of good. The supernatural order is the supreme good, as for any Eastern mystic; but the natural order is good; as solidly good as it is for any man in the street.
 * G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)

 * As a highly Pagan poet said to me: "The Reformation happened because people hadn't the brains to understand Aquinas." The Church is more immortally important than the State; but the State has its rights, for all that. This Christian duality had always been implicit, as in Christ's distinction between God and Caesar, or the dogmatic distinction between the natures of Christ. But St. Thomas has the glory of having seized this double thread as the clue to a thousand things; and thereby created the only creed in which the saints can be sane. It presents itself chiefly, perhaps, to the modern world as the only creed in which the poets can be sane. For there is nobody now to settle the Manichees; and all culture is infected with a faint unclean sense that Nature and all things behind us and below us are bad; that there is only praise to the highbrow in the height. St. Thomas exalted God without lowering Man; he exalted Man without lowering Nature. Therefore, he made a cosmos of common sense; terra viventium; a land of the living. His philosophy, like his theology, is that of common sense. He does not torture the brain with desperate attempts to explain existence by explaining it away. The first steps of his mind are the first steps of any honest mind; just as the first virtues of his creed could be those of any honest peasant.
 * G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)

 * The philosopher can reflect on the ordinary man's awareness of attaining truth, but he has not at his disposal some extraordinary and special means of proving that we can know truth or that 'knowledge' is knowledge. If a philosopher were to comment that in this case we can never prove that we can attain proof and that if we cannot prove it we can never know it, Aquinas might reply that the sort of proof which the philosopher is looking for is inherently useless and indeed impossible, but that it does not follow that we cannot both attain truth and also know that we can attain it. We do not need any further guarantee of our ability to attain truth than our awareness or recognition of the fact that we do in fact attain it.
 * Frederick Copleston, Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker (1955)

 * Thomas Aquinas, who has likewise been brought under the imputation of magic, was one of the profoundest scholars and subtlest logicians of his day. He also furnishes a remarkable instance of the ascent which the friars at that time obtained over the minds of ingenious young men smitten with the thirst of knowledge.
 * It was to be expected that a man who thus immersed himself in the depths of thought should be an inexorable enemy to noise and interruption. We have seen that he dashed to pieces the artificial man of brass that Albertus Magnus, who was his tutor, had spent thirty years in bringing to perfection, being impelled to this violence by its perpetual and unceasing garrulity. It is further said, that his study being place in a great thoroughfare, where the grooms were all day long excersing their horses, he found it necessary to apply a remedy to this nuisance. He made, by the laws of magic, a small horse of brass,which he buried two or three feet under ground in the midst of the highway, and, having done so, no horse would any longer pass along the road.
 * William Godwin, Lives of the Necromancers (1835), pp. 186–187.

 * Aristotle had not been popular in the ancient world, but his ideas were picked up by the materialistically-minded Arabs as they were developing their culture, and from there his works were introduced into Western Europe. They became the rage, stimulating a whole intellectual revival. It soon became necessary for the church to deal with this point of view, and through the genius of Thomas Aquinas all of the church ideas were rewritten within the framework of Aristotle's ideas with their mythological character reduced to a bare minimum.
 * Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974)

 * [According to St. Thomas] the soul is not transmitted with the semen, but is created afresh with each man. There is, it is true, a difficulty: when a man is born out of wedlock, this seems to make God an accomplice in adultery. This objection, however, is only specious. (There is a grave objection, which troubled Saint Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam? This is not discussed.)
 * Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Chapter XIII: Saint Thomas Aquinas

 * There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.
 * Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Chapter XIII: Saint Thomas Aquinas

 * In speaking of Thomas Aquinas, who, it is true, had not attained at the time when Roger Bacon wrote to the commanding position of authority which was afterwards accorded to him in the schools, he couples him with Albertus Magnus, and says that they both became teachers before they had been adequately taught, and lectured on a philosophy and a theology which they had imperfectly learned.
 * Francis Seymour Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste: Bishop of Lincoln (1899)

 * The medieval theologians would not be surprised at a prerequisite of a degree in physics for a degree in theology. In their time, the highest degree in philosophy—which included the most advanced knowledge of physics of the day—was a prerequisite before a student was permitted to begin study for a degree in theology ...Kenny has shown the Aquinas' Five Ways—his five proofs of God's existence—are absolutely dependent on Aristotelian physics... Aquinas... was one of the leading scholars of Aristotelian physics... and... was primarily responsible for... [its] general acceptance throughout Europe. We could call Aquinas a great physicist as well as a great theologian, for, although Aristotelian physics was wrong, it was an essential precursor of modern physics.
 * , The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (1994) p. 329. Ref: Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas' Proof of God's Existence (1969) p. 329.

 * St. Thomas Aquinas ...in the Summa, which remains the greatest work of medieval thought, accepts the idea that certain animals, spring from the decaying bodies of plants and animals, and declares that they are produced by the creative word of God either actually or virtually. He develops this view by saying, "Nothing was made by God, after the six days of creation, absolutely new, but it was in some sense included in the work of the six days"; and that "even new species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction."
 * Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) Vol.1 p. 55

 * The life and teaching of St Thomas Aquinas could be summed up in an episode passed down by his ancient biographers. While, as was his wont, the Saint was praying before the Crucifix in the early morning in the chapel of St Nicholas in Naples, Domenico da Caserta, the church sacristan, overheard a conversation. Thomas was anxiously asking whether what he had written on the mysteries of the Christian faith was correct. And the Crucified One answered him: "You have spoken well of me, Thomas. What is your reward to be?". And the answer Thomas gave him was what we too, friends and disciples of Jesus, always want to tell him: "Nothing but Yourself, Lord!"
 * Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, 2 June 2010

title: Thomas Aquinas


text:
Alexis Carrel

Alexis Carrel (28 June 1873 – 5 November 1944) was a French surgeon and biologist suchas leading eugenicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912.

Quotes

 * All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.
 * As quoted in Nava-Vēda : God and Man (Nara and Narayan) (1968) by M. B. Raja Rao, p. 229

(1935)

 * Full text available

 * [M]en cannot follow modern civilization along its present course, because they are degenerating. They have been fascinated by the beauty of the sciences of inert matter. They have not understood that their body and consciousness are subjected to natural laws, more obscure than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the sidereal world. Neither have they understood that they cannot transgress these laws without being punished. They must, therefore, learn the necessary relations of the cosmic universe, of their fellow men, and of their inner selves, and also those of their tissues and their mind. Indeed, man stands above all things. Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization, and even the grandeur of the physical universe, would vanish. ... Humanity's attention must turn from the machines of the world of inanimate matter to the body and the soul of man, to the organic and mental processes which have created the machines and the universe of Newton and Einstein

 * We must single out the children who are endowed with high potentialities, and develop them as completely as possible. And in this manner give to the nation a non-hereditary aristocracy. Such children may be found in all classes of society, although distinguished men appear more frequently in distinguished families than in others. The descendants of the founders of American civilization may still possess the ancestral qualities. These qualities are generally hidden under the cloak of degeneration. But this degeneration is often superficial. It comes chiefly from education, idleness, lack of responsibility and moral discipline. The sons of very rich men, like those of criminals, should be removed while still infants from their natural surroundings. Thus separated from their family, they could manifest their hereditary strength. In the aristocratic families of Europe there are also individuals of great vitality. The issue of the Crusaders is by no means extinct. The laws of genetics indicate the probability that the legendary audacity and love of adventure can appear again in the lineage of the feudal lords. It is possible also that the offspring of the great criminals who had imagination, courage, and judgment, of the heroes of the French or Russian Revolutions, of the high-handed business men who live among us, might be excellent building stones for an enterprising minority. As we know, criminality is not hereditary if not united with feeble-mindedness or other mental or cerebral defects. High potentialities are rarely encountered in the sons of honest, intelligent, hard-working men who have had ill luck in their careers, who have failed in business or have muddled along all their lives in inferior positions. Or among peasants living on the same spot for centuries. However, from such people sometimes spring artists, poets, adventurers, saints. A brilliantly gifted and well-known New York family came from peasants who cultivated their farm in the south of France from the time of Charlemagne to that of Napoleon.

 * We have mentioned that natural selection has not played its part for a long while. That many inferior individuals have been conserved through the efforts of hygiene and medicine. But we cannot prevent the reproduction of the weak when they are neither insane nor criminal. Or destroy sickly or defective children as we do the weaklings in a litter of puppies. The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance of the weak is to develop the strong. Our efforts to render normal the unfit are evidently useless. We should, then, turn our attention toward promoting the optimum growth of the fit. By making the strong still stronger, we could effectively help the weak; For the herd always profits by the ideas and inventions of the elite. Instead of leveling organic and mental inequalities, we should amplify them and construct greater men.

 * The progress of the strong depends on the conditions of their development and the possibility left to parents of transmitting to their offspring the qualities which they have acquired in the course of their existence. Modern society must, therefore, allow to all a certain stability of life, a home, a garden, some friends. Children must be reared in contact with things which are the expression of the mind of their parents. It is imperative to stop the transformation of the farmer, the artisan, the artist, the professor, and the man of science into manual or intellectual proletarians, possessing nothing but their hands or their brains. The development of this proletariat will be the everlasting shame of industrial civilization. It has contributed to the disappearance of the family as a social unit, and to the weakening of intelligence and moral sense. It is destroying the remains of culture. All forms of the proletariat must be suppressed. Each individual should have the security and the stability required for the foundation of a family. Marriage must cease being only a temporary union. The union of man and woman, like that of the higher anthropoids, ought to last at least until the young have no further need of protection. The laws relating to education, and especially to that of girls, to marriage, and divorce should, above all, take into account the interest of children. Women should receive a higher education, not in order to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, but to rear their offspring to be valuable human beings. The free practice of eugenics could lead not only to the development of stronger individuals, but also of strains endowed with more endurance, intelligence, and courage. These strains should constitute an aristocracy, from which great men would probably appear. Modern society must promote, by all possible means, the formation of better human stock. No financial or moral rewards should be too great for those who, through the wisdom of their marriage, would engender geniuses. The complexity of our civilization is immense. No one can master all its mechanisms. However, these mechanisms have to be mastered. There is need today of men of larger mental and moral size, capable of accomplishing such a task. The establishment of a hereditary biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics would be an important step toward the solution of our present problems.

 * L'intelligence est presque inutile à celui qui ne possède qu'elle.
 * Intelligence is almost useless to the person whose only quality it is.

 * The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.
 * As quoted by Andrés Horacio Reggiani: God's eugenicist. Alexis Carrel and the sociobiology of decline. Berghahn Books, Oxford 2007, p. 71. See Der Mensch, das unbekannte Wesen. DVA, Stuttgart 1937.

 * The existence of finality within the organism is undeniable. Each part seems to know the present and future needs of the whole, and acts accordingly. The significance of time and space is not the same for our tissues as for our mind. The body perceives the remote as well as the near, the future as well as the present.
 * p. 197

 * The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their right is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all their inequalities is dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an elite.
 * p. 271 (as quoted from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 324, note 11)

 * Man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.
 * Chapter 8

title: Alexis Carrel


text:
Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (22 April (O.S. 10 April) 1899 – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American writer. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but gained international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English; his Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
 * See also:
 * Lolita
 * Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Quotes

 * And there are things that are hard to talk about—you'll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word.
 * Letter to then-girlfriend Véra (26 July 1923); in Letters to Véra (2014), p 3.

 * What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
 * Despair [Отчаяние (Otchayanie)] (1936).

 * Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly.
 * "A Discovery" (December 1941); published as "On Discovering a Butterfly" in The New Yorker (15 May 1943); also in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 274.

 * To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
 * Letter to his sister Elena Sikorski (1945); in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 387.

 * The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
 * Problems of translation (1955).

 * Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.
 * Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.

 * Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
 * Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

 * I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.
 * Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

 * Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
 * Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 4th series (1977), p. 107 ISBN 0-140-04543-0

 * Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
 * As quoted in What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community (2001) by Sangharakshita, p. 136.

 * Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
 * As quoted in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi

 * I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.
 * On Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Sigmund Says: And Other Psychotherapists' Quotes (2006) edited by Bernard Nisenholz, p. 6 ISBN 0595396593

 * Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
 * Interview with Nabokov conducted on September 25, 27, 28, 29, 1966, at Montreux, Switzerland and published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967.

 * The fact that since my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.
 * Playboy 1964 interview

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)

 * U.S. title: Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir

 * The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

 * Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

 * Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

 * A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Bend Sinister (1963)

 * The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.
 * p. vi.

 * In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
 * p. x.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941)

 * An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. .... I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova — an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to whithold. Her dry account cannot convey to the untravelled reader the implied delights of a winter day such as she describes in St. Petersburg; the pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly coloured bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined white; the rasp and twinkle of winter traffic… and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for the moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight, self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees — on this painted photograph — a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality.
 * p. 5.

Lolita (1955)

 * These are just a few sample quotes; for more quotes see Lolita - for a study guide see the wikibook entry for Lolita.

 * Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
 * Opening lines.

 * Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)

 * This was written as an "Afterword" to Lolita which has been used in all later editions; for more see Lolita.

 * After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.
 * As quoted in "Nabokov's Love Affairs" by R. W. Flint in The New Republic (17 June 1957).

 * As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
 * As quoted at Penn State University Libraries.

Pale Fire (1962)

 * The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.

 *  I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane;

 * No free man needs a God; but was I free?

 * What moment in that gradual decay
 * Does resurrection choose? What year?
 * Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
 * Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
 * A syllogism; other men die
 * But I am not another: therefore I'll not die.

 * For we die every day; oblivion thrives

 * Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
 * And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
 * Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

 * You have hal...... real bad, chum.
 * Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
 * "What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?"
 * True art is above false honor.
 * We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the nineteen thirties.
 * This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.
 * I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least.
 * In due time history will have denounced everybody.
 * But no aorta could report regret.
 * A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
 * And blood-black nothingness began to spin
 * A system of cells interlinked within
 * Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
 * Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
 * Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
 * Quoted in dialogue in the movie Blade Runner 2049

Strong Opinions (1973)

 * I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.
 * "Foreword", p. 3.

 * My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
 * "Foreword", p. 3.

 * I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
 * From a BBC Interview (1962), p. 14.

 * I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
 * p. 18.

 * To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
 * p. 45

 * To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple" — "Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere" — under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
 * p. 32.

 * Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
 * On the ideas of Sigmund Freud, p. 66.

 * Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?
 * On the first moon landing, p. 150.

Lectures on Literature (1980)

 * The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).

 * Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

 * A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.

 * Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.

 * The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. ... The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.

 * The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

Quotes about Nabokov or his work

 * Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift — which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night.
 * Anonymous review of Lolita, "To the End of Night" in TIME magazine (1 September 1958).

 * I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers...Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov.
 * Isabel Allende Interview

 * All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.
 * Martin Amis in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002).

 * Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it.
 * Frederic Babcock, editor of the Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books as quoted in "The Lolita Case" in TIME magazine (17 November 1958).

 * He can write, but he's got nothing to say.
 * Soviet novelist Isaac Babel as quoted in Memoirs: 1921-1941 (1964) by Ilya Ehrenburg, page 110.

 * Nabakov wrote on index cards, at a lectern, in his socks.
 * Nick Cave, from the song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" on the 2003 album ''Nocturama".

 * (The last book you read that made you furious?) Nabokov’s lecture on Jane Austen documented in “Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature,” edited by Fredson Bowers. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov wrote: “I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.” There’s pride and prejudice for you!
 * Sandra Cisneros interview (2021)

 * (F.J.: You put Nabokov in the category of American literature?) Desai: Of necessity, yes. I have a feeling probably he himself saw himself as an American writer. After all, he deliberately began to write in English-abandoned Russian and wrote in English. I think his richest novels are the very earliest ones, which he wrote in Russian. But I reread Lolita recently and it seemed to me a masterpiece, and it's an American masterpiece.
 * Anita Desai In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock (1992)

 * Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?
 * Roman Jakobson declining VN a position at Harvard in 1957 (The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir E. Alexandrov (editor). Garland Publishing, New York and London (1995), ISNB 0-8153-0354-8, page xlv).

 * Vladimir Nabokov-to me, his is not a good prose style. It is self-conscious, self-reflective, rather posturing, goes in for a lot of fancy vocabulary; it is always bringing me up short. I want to say, "Oh, stop showing off, Vladimir, get on with it."
 * 1988 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

 * I don't like Nabokov. I'm told I have to read Ada because it's a science fiction novel, but I can't read it. Boring.
 * 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

 * there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: ...Ursula K. Le Guin...and Nabokov
 * Rosa Montero Interview with rain taxi (2017), Translated from the Spanish by Jorge Armenteros

 * I think some of the greatest writing has been also about writers like Conrad or Nabokov, who have illuminated and given us fresh views about the new countries they adopted. Nabokov's best work was about America, and it was written during his period of exile in this country and later in Switzerland. And I think he could see this America through the eyes of his Russia. And even Russian language glimmers through those amazingly light field scenes in Lolita or his other works. So it is not just that other country that comes to us. This new country is also nourished because language is also a home. And when you change that home and come to a new thing, you'd love to play with it.
 * Azar Nafisi 2010 interview included in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (2017)

 * Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.
 * Joyce Carol Oates in "A Personal View of Nabokov" in ''Saturday Review of the Arts (January 1973).

 * Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book — all right then — a great book.
 * Dorothy Parker's review in Esquire, as quoted in "The Lolita Case" in TIME magazine (17 November 1958).

 * The political barbarism of the century made him an exile, a wanderer, a Hotelmensch, not only from his Russian homeland but from the matchless Russian tongue in which his genius would have found its unforced idiom... But I have no hesitation in arguing that this poly-linguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov's life and art. But whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a travelling potentate...
 * George Steiner in Extraterritorial (1972), p. 7.

 * Mr. Nabokov's story of the dehumanization of man under tyranny is, after all, a claustrophobic story. Whether or not it was the author's intention to model his prose system on the social system he is attacking, this is exactly what he has accomplished.
 * Diana Trilling Reviewing the Forties (1974)

 * Some say the Great American Novel is Huckleberry Finn, some say it's The Jungle, some say it's The Great Gatsby. But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession — the view of America that could only have come from an outsider — Nabokov's Lolita. ... Those who bought "Lolita" looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. Lolita is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes Lolita a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but Lolita forever remains a thing of timeless beauty.
 * Mary Elizabeth Williams in her "Personal Best" review at Salon.com.

 * If I say that Nabokov, who was educated in England... turns out to be a master of English prose — the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind since Conrad — this is likely to sound incredible. If I say that Nabokov is something like Proust, something like Franz Kafka, and, probably something like Gogol, I shall suggest an imitative patchwork, where Nabokov is as completely himself as any of these others — a man with a unique sensibility and a unique story to tell.
 * Edmund Wilson, as quoted in "Nabokov's Love Affairs" by R. W. Flint in The New Republic (17 June 1957).

title: Vladimir Nabokov


text:
Joe Haldeman

Joe William Haldeman (born 9 June 1943) is an American science fiction author.

The Forever War (1974)

 * All page numbers from the author’s definitive version, published in trade paperback by Thomas Dunne Books

 * She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 28)

 * Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there...the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 46)

 * I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice“ had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 107)

 * It was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 108)

 * I never found anyone else and I don’t want anyone else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.
 * Chapter 35 (p. 264)

Mindbridge (1976)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Avon

 * Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.
 * Chapter 8 “Geoformy 1” (p. 33)

 * CAROL: You don’t care for the music? JACQUE: Music! It’s just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes.
 * Chapter 18 “Chapter 6: Prelude” (p. 64)

 * “We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”
 * Chapter 28 “Chapter Eight” (p. 104)

For White Hill (1995)

 * All page numbers from the reprint of the story in the mass market paperback "Year's Best SF" edited by David G. Hartwell and published by Harper

 * Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.
 * p. 225

 * I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.
 * p. 257

Forever Peace (1997)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace

 * In a physical way we’re closer than any civilian pair could be, since in full combat jack we are this one creature with twenty arms and legs, with ten brains, with five vaginas and five penises. Some people call the feeling godlike, and I think there have been gods who were constructed along similar lines. The one I grew up with was an old white-bearded Caucasian gent without even one vagina.
 * p. 8

 * Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past.
 * p. 14

 * One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.
 * p. 25

 * We did it with their government’s foreknowledge and permission, of course—and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they’re dead they’re rebels.
 * p. 27

 * It was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.
 * p. 36

 * Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true.
 * pp. 44-45

 * She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?” “I think it’s a difference between you and merely sane people.”
 * p. 54

 * Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger.
 * p. 146

 * “You were a Jesuit?” “Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass.”
 * p. 198

 * Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
 * p. 205

 * Human nature does change, and the fact that we’ve developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise there would be no universe. Unless we’re the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we’re the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Somebody does have to be first. But maybe the first is always the last.
 * p. 205

 * “You’re actually a soldier,” he said to me, “and you go along with this foolishness?” “I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.”
 * p. 227

 * “Some are born crazy,” Amelia said. “Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us.”
 * p. 249

Forever Free (1999)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace, ISBN 0-441-00787-2 (November 2000), first printing

 * The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats.
 * Chapter 2 (p. 14)

 * “We’re in jail, Charlie.” I made a gesture that didn’t knock anything over. “We can’t see the bars because they’re over the horizon.”
 * Chapter 3 (p. 34)

 * The more leaves, the more Tree.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 38)
 * Fathers and daughters don’t communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren’t involved.
 * Chapter 11 (p. 91)

 * Fish and chickens were the only animals we’d had aboard in zerogee. Fish can’t tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 141)

 * I could have argued with his logic, but over the years have learned to find more pleasant ways to waste my time.
 * Chapter 20 (p. 182)

 * Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
 * Chapter 28 (p. 226)

 * “But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind.” “Including this ‘nameless’ stuff,” I said. “That’s true. And at various times in my life, I’ve wondered whether it might not be a delusion—some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there’s no way you or I could prove that the nameless don’t exist.”
 * Chapter 30 (p. 254)

 * My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I’d always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn’t want to have him over for dinner. I’ll stand by that last part.
 * Chapter 32 (p. 269)

Camouflage (2004)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace

 * It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.
 * Chapter 24 (p. 133)

The Accidental Time Machine (2007)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace

 * Rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.
 * Chapter 12 (pp. 110-111)

 * If you asked him, he would say the only connection between free will and religion in his life was the fact that he hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since he turned eighteen.
 * Chapter 14 (p. 152)

 * “Everybody rich and happy.” She smiled. “Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.”
 * Chapter 15 (p. 181)

title: Joe Haldeman