"I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess."

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“The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.”

“How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.”

“I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.”

“It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you...so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.”

“All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind.”

“Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It really worries me that 84% of this audience agrees with that statement, because the kind of people that say "political correctness gone mad" are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action …"

— Stewart Lee

Literature1968

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"To be perfectly honest, it has had its handicaps. The thing is that people judge you by your parents' and people expect me to be just like daddy and mother. Therefore, I can't run across the street or…"

— Yolanda King

Social Activism1955–2007

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"To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child l…"

— Saul Alinsky

Politics1909–1972

#family