Some Notable Quotes

I spent way too much time compiling and editting all these quotes. Luckily I was drunk most of the time!

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
- Edward Abbey

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
- Victor Hugo
Ninetythree

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
- Ursula K. LeGuin

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
- Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
- Kerry Thornley
The Principia Discordia, 5th edition

All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy.
- Peter Wastholm

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.
- Alfred Hitchcock

If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.
- Adolf Hitler

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
- Voltaire
War

Peter: Ok, here's another riddle. A woman has two children. A homicidal murderer tells her she can only keep one. Which one does she let him kill?
Brian: That's... that's not a riddle. That's ... that's just terrible.
Peter: Wrong, the ugly one!

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Good Omens

To make and apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe.
- Carl Sagan

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
- Albert Einstein

It's an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
- Gloria Steinem

Then I saw a sign which said 'Drink Canada Dry' - so we started.
- Brendan Behan

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
- E. M. Cioran

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
- Cyril Connoly

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
- Anonymous

Imagine, if you will, a worldwide conspiracy to deny the existence of the color yellow and whenever you saw yellow they told you no, that isn't yellow, what the fuck's yellow? Eventually, whenever you saw yellow, you would say: that isn't yellow, course, it isnt blue or green or purple, or... you'd say it, yes it is, it's yellow, and become increasingly hysterical, and then go quite berserk.
- David Edgar
Mary Barnes

Someone from Greenpeace walked up to me the other day and started yelling 'MURDERER! MURDERER! What do you see when you see a cow grazing one of Mother Nature's beautiful green fields, what do you see!?' Now I'm a vegetarian but I just didn't like his attitude so I said 'Mate, when I see a cow I see a steak wrapped in a leather jacket.'
- Will Anderson

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
- Henry Miller

It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds walls; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exists.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!
- Robert Anton Wilson
The Principia Discordia

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.
- Robert Anton Wilson
The Principia Discordia

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
- Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
- Charles Bukowski

Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent.
- Bruno Jasienski
Yasensky

Hell is when there is no reason to live and no courage to die.
- William Markiewicz
Extracts of Existence

The party is not concerned with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, providing that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.
- George Orwell

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
- George Orwell

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
- George Orwell

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
- George Orwell

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
- George Orwell

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
- George Orwell

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
- George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
- George Orwell

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
- George Orwell

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
- George Orwell

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
- George Orwell

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
- Bertrand Russell

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
- Aldous Huxley

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
- Bertrand Russell

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.
- Robert G. Ingersoll

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.
- Martin H. Fischer

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
- George Bernard Shaw

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.
- John J. Miller
And Hope to Die, in Jokertown Shuffle Wild Cards IX

Religion is the opium of the masses.
- Karl Marx

They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come - it will, if his prayer is heard. A terrible day of vengeance when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy.
- Solomon Northup

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.
- Fran Lebowitz

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
- John Maynard Keynes

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse it true.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or he should have made my brain to fit his book.
- Robert G. Ingersoll

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
- E. M. Forster

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.
- Antony Flew
The Presumption of Atheism, God, Freedom, and Immortality

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
- Dan Barker

Ask youself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
- Ayn Rand

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
- Albert Einstein

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Freidrich Nietzsche

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
- Toulouse-Lautrec

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
- Clarence Darrow

Where it is duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
- John Morley

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
- Jean Rostand

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
- Karl Marx

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
- Karl Marx

Religion is the opium of the masses.
- Karl Marx

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.
- Mikhail Bakunin

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
- Mikhail Bakunin

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
- Mikhail Bakunin

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
- Karl Marx

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
- Karl Marx

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
- Karl Marx

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
- Mikhail Bakunin

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
- Mikhail Bakunin

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
- Mikhail Bakunin

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.
- Peter Kropotkin

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
- Emma Goldman

Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.
-Henry David Thereau

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
- Auberon Herbert

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.
- Emma Goldman

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
- Emma Goldman

Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
- Herbert Read

We see that not only is the emperor naked--he is a murder, tyrant, brigand, liar, and bungler.
- James Harris

Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now controls the past
Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now?

Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all.
- August Spies

'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.
- Emma Goldman

The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
- Leo Tolstoy

Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrawise, must check tradition by reason.
- Leo Tolstoy

The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!
- Max Stirner

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.
- Errico Malatesta

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
- Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife

Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.
- Noam Chomsky

In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property.
- Daniel Guérin

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
- Edward Abbey

Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey

Liberal-Democracy seldom voices any arguments against anarchism as such-other than relying on prejudice-because its objections are purely authoritarian, and unmask the innate Statism and authoritarianism of liberalism.
- Albert Meltzer

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
- John Kenneth Galbraith