"Consider the human mind! It is capable of amazing feats when used properly. Conversely, without exercise it atrophies to a lump of gray-yellow fat."

Jack Vance Literature See all quotes by Jack Vance →

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“Evidently you do not trust me. This does not predispose me to trust you.”

“My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.”

“My fees are not too high. Your wage scale may simply be too low.”

““Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?” asked Shimrod. “Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.”

“I suspect that the word was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.”

“Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insist…"

— Terence McKenna

Philosophy1946–2000

#society

"I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melanch…"

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Literature1772–1834

#happiness

"I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species t…"

— Suzanne Collins

Literature1962

#family

"Some teachers of mankind — as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists — have gone so far as to repudiate art. ... so highly dangerous in its power to infect people again…"

— Leo Tolstoy

Literature1828–1910

#education