“A ship is safe in the port, but that is not what a ship is for.”
Author unknown
“Once, long ago, a little crazy hypothesis was thrown across a dark sky and left there. And people could never forget it. Religions were built by its light, poets’ minds shone in its brightness, political systems used its warmth to draw men closer together, and science examined it cautiously and ‘proved’ it to be the essence of sanity, the seed of human growth. It may be only a bedtime story that men told themselves in their loneliness; it may be a lie: this sanctity of the human being, this importance of man the individual, this right of the child to grow, but when it is proved so, there will no longer be an earth to witness the lie’s triumph and no men here to mourn the loss of their dream.”
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
“He uttered my name as if a fire had broken out.”
Peter Lovesey, Bertie and the Seven Bodies
“One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing.”
C.S. Lewis God in the Dock
“Words cannot express how deeply I regret the Annexation of Schleswig-Holstein.”
Florence King in National Review July 14 1997 (re politicians' fatuous habit of apologizing for historical deeds they had nothing to do with)
“No one is better placed to resist pressure than the person who knows he can’t give in to it.”
Conor Cruise O’Brien The Siege
“Leaders have two characteristics: (1) they are going somewhere; (2) they can persuade others to go with them.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.
"The consciousness of genius is bad for people."
Virginia Woolf in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, re Robert Graves, quoted in Raleigh Trevelyan’s Introduction to Robert Graves Goodbye to All That