User:ReconditeRodent/Quotes

''' This is ReconditeRodent's Monthly Quote Generator Superpage. '''

Current availiable subpages:

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: User:ReconditeRodent/Quotes/The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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<!-- Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…
 * The World (15 November 1893)

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
 * Annajanska (1919)

My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
 * You Never Can Tell, Act IV

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
 * Overruled (1912)

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
 * "The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
 * Everybody's Political What's What (1944) Ch. 30

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
 * Man and Superman (1903)

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
 * Man and Superman (1903)

Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
 * Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) #1

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
 * Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) #32

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
 * Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) #124

Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
 * Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) #162

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.
 * Major Barbara (1905), Preface

Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.
 * Major Barbara (1905), Preface

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
 * John Bull's Other Island (1907), Act II

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.
 * Misalliance (1910)

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
 * The Doctor's Dilemma (1911), Preface

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
 * The Doctor's Dilemma (1911), Act V

Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
 * Pygmalion (1912), Act V

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
 * Androcles and the Lion (1913)

Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.
 * Androcles and the Lion (1913)

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
 * Back to Methuselah (1921), The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
 * Back to Methuselah (1921), The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.
 * Back to Methuselah (1921), The She-Ancient, in Pt. V

When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
 * Back to Methuselah (1921), The He-Ancient, in Pt. V

Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
 * Back to Methuselah (1921), Acis, in Pt. V

______________________________________________________

A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.


 * — The Futurological Congress

The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.


 * — The Star Diaries

''For moral reasons I am an atheist — for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.''


 * — The Missouri Review, "An Interview with Stanisław Lem" (1984)

''We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds.''


 * — Solaris, "The Minor Apocrypha"

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.


 * — Solaris, "The Old Mimoid"

'' Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,

Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,

Their indices bedecked from one to n,

Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,

And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space

Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.

Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,

We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,

Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;

And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,

And in bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,

Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,

Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,

Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?

Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,

A root or two, a torus and a node:

The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!

The product of our scalars is defined!

Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind

Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,

I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.

Bernoulli would have been content to die,

Had he but known such $$a^2 cos 2 \phi$$!''


 * — The Cyberiad

_______________________________________________________________   Sherlock Holmes: Did he offer you money to spy on me...? John Watson: Yes. Sherlock Holmes: Did you take it? John Watson: ...No? Sherlock Holmes: Pity, we could've split the fee. Think it through next time

I'm not a psychopath, Anderson, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.

Sherlock Holmes: Punch me in the face. John Watson: Punch you? Sherlock Holmes: Yes, punch me, in the face. Didn't you hear me? John Watson: I always hear "punch me in the face" when you're speaking, but it's usually subtext.

Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side.

This is brilliant. Phone Lestrade, tell him there's an escaped rabbit. -->