"Linguistic accommodation as well. Are they speaking my language or am I speaking theirs? I can never know: the transaction cannot watch itself being transacted."

Robert Sheckley Literature See all quotes by Robert Sheckley →

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“I’ll follow the reedy tenor of his excuses and blast them with the bellowy bass of irrefutable logic!”

“It was one hell of an inspection when you went around finding how many sane men you had left.”

“Even rulers, notoriously the slowest of men to change, realized that something had to be done.”

“Blaine remembered how strange, dark, atavistic and noble Hull’s lordly selection of death has seemed. Pretentious, of course; but then, life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter.”

“In a way it made no difference, since nothing is permanent except our illusions.”

“After many centuries we have rediscovered nature’s way of keeping populations in hand. Nature does it the old-fashioned way, by killing people.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Campaign groups which used to oppose neo-Nazis realized that there weren’t sufficient Nazis to justify their business models. They decided that, henceforth, attacking parties such as Ukip should also …"

— Douglas Murray

Economics1979

#philosophy

"Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze yo…"

— Hubert Selby

Literature1928–2004

#philosophy

"Everyone else on the planet, from the lowest amoebae to the great blue whale, expresses all their component elements in a perfect dance with the world around them. Only human beings have unfulfilled l…"

— Nicholas Lore

Science1944

#philosophy

"Upon the low value of "constructive" criticism I can offer testimony out of my own experience. My books have been commonly reviewed at length, and many critics have devoted themselves to pointing out …"

— H. L. Mencken

Literature1880–1956

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