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The Dream Café Weblog

Quotables

“The reformist party sees as unshakable that which it intends to reform.”  – Trotsky

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” –Michael Chabon

“Ambiguity is our most valuable thingie.” –Reed Waller

45 Comments

45 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Evrett // Jan 21, 2010 at 1:11 pm

    xcellence is… Caring more than others think wise. Risking more than others think safe. Dreaming more than others think practical. Expecting more than others think possible – Tulsa Boy Scouts

    Problems are solved in pieces. If you are on the 7th floor of a burning building you can either die or jump out a window. Once you are out the window you are alive for another 2 seconds, during which time you figure out the solution to the next problem and so on..if you are falling off a building you might as well try to fly as you’ve got nothing to lose. – Babylon 5

    Virgin birth, water into wine; it’s like Harry Potter, but it causes Genocide and bad folk music -American Dad

  • 2 Evrett // Jan 21, 2010 at 2:41 pm

    “Every decision you have made..has been right. Every decision I have made..has been wrong. But there is one thing: I have never lied about who I was, what I was doing, or why I was doing it..” – Satan

  • 3 Erik // Apr 15, 2010 at 12:22 am

    “To arms, To arms!… Two legs, Two legs baby.” -Stonekeep

    “And, isn’t sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you’re good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit. ” -The Tick

  • 4 James // May 8, 2010 at 12:04 am

    Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. -Will Rogers

    I’m high alright, but not on false drugs!
    I’m high on the real thing; powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine. -Pastor Rod Flash

    Excuse me, not excuse me. You’re making, not making the doctor very unhappy, happy. -Doctor Memory

    The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences. -Third Zen Patriarch

  • 5 Bergen Evans // Jun 23, 2010 at 8:26 pm

    Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

    Bergen Evans
    A Tale of a Tub, 1946.

  • 6 Jo'din // Jan 11, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    “I’d do anything to have a body like that guy. Anything, except diet and exercise.” -Steve Martin

  • 7 Adam // Jan 12, 2011 at 7:28 am

    “Very well, I agree with the need for an axe.”
    - Tazendra

  • 8 Nivm // Jan 15, 2011 at 2:35 pm

    “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
    — C.S. Lewis

    (At least, I think that’s who said it.)

  • 9 skzb // Jan 24, 2011 at 8:53 am

    “Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for heath. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.”
    — Twain

  • 10 Steve Halter // Jan 25, 2011 at 8:49 am

    “Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.”
    —Roger Zelazny, Yama to Tak

  • 11 BBWolf // Jan 25, 2011 at 3:12 pm

    “Do you mean oil?”

    “No! I mean black blood of the earth.”

    Egg to Jack Burton
    Big Trouble in Little China

  • 12 knob_e // Mar 15, 2011 at 1:33 am

    “Doors, doors, doors”

    Roger Zelazny
    *Nine Princes in Amber*

  • 13 Richy // Mar 15, 2011 at 11:51 pm

    “Mother, should I trust the government?” – Pink Floyd, Mother

  • 14 schmwarf // Mar 16, 2011 at 5:27 pm

    “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”

    Carl Sagan, 1980

  • 15 KWBwyoming // Apr 10, 2011 at 5:11 am

    Outside of a dog , a book is a man’s best friend . Inside a dog it’s too dark to read . Groucho Marx

  • 16 knob_e // Jun 20, 2011 at 1:48 am

    “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

    —J. R. R. Tolkien
    First appearing in *The Fellowship of the Ring*, Book I, Chapter 3, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of *The Lord of the Rings*.
    (*Snap*—and thank-you, Jim Butcher; that’s 11+ down, 5+ to go.)

  • 17 Kreistor // Jun 20, 2011 at 1:40 pm

    “No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style.”

    –Steven Brust, (Pretty certain from the Novel Taltos, but may have been Jhereg, Yendi, or Teckla)

    (Addendum: unless he’s undead, but that would be spoiling…)

  • 18 Ty // Jun 20, 2011 at 9:57 pm

    “I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. It was way too literal for me.” -Mitch Hedberg.

  • 19 knob_e // Jun 20, 2011 at 11:50 pm

    re “No matter how subtle the wizard….” @17:

    —S. K. Z. Brust
    First appearing in *Taltos* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.

  • 20 knob_e // Jun 21, 2011 at 12:02 am

    Crap, screwed up again. @ 19 should have said:

    First appearing in *Jhereg* as Chapter 17 header, then invoked as a familiar adage throughout the rest of the *Taltos* series.

  • 21 Nolly // Jun 21, 2011 at 12:28 am

    Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.

    (No idea who originated that particular spoof.)

  • 22 Legion // Jun 22, 2011 at 5:34 am

    The first priest was the first scoundrel to meet the first fool.

    Voltaire, Rousseau, or my history teacher

  • 23 Mndrew // Jun 23, 2011 at 7:49 pm

    “Never date a girl whose brothers have knife scars.” – Slovotsky’s law #17
    Joel Rosenberg, The Sleeping Dragon

  • 24 knob_e // Jun 25, 2011 at 2:06 am

    “Moreover our memory is like a sieve, the holes of which in time get larger and larger: the older we get, the quicker anything entrusted to it slips from the memory, whereas, what was fixed fast in it in early days is there still.”
    – Arthur Schopenhauer; “Psychological Observations”

    Or, to put it in Vlad’s Notes form:

    “Memory is like a Whatchacallit.”
    – Steven Brust; Chapter 1 header for *Dragon*
    (His *other* 17-part Cite the Source challenge to readers. Still struggling to get a firm handle on it. Not much liking the fingerholds I’ve snagged so far.)

  • 25 Mark A. Mandel // Aug 8, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    knob_e@24: Possibly via Pratchett:

    Chapter ??? of Pratchett’s FaustXXXXXEric is titled, “Memory Is Like a Wossname”.

    http://cracksandshards.com/jokes.html#Pratchett

    Mark A. Mandel, proprietor, Cracks and Shards
    http://www.cracksandshards.com
    a Steven Brust fan website

  • 26 James R // Sep 10, 2011 at 12:06 pm

    Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
    -Diderot

  • 27 Mike Acuna // Oct 3, 2011 at 9:55 pm

    “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think!”
    - Dorothy Parker

  • 28 Shoelace // Oct 4, 2011 at 4:33 pm

    That quote by Satan is interesting….curious where it comes from.

  • 29 Sharon C. // Oct 5, 2011 at 8:23 am

    @ Shoelace
    “To Reign in Hell” by our favorite author.

  • 30 Stephen Garvey // Oct 9, 2011 at 6:32 pm

    “…He would be an ideal judge. He has the kind of daring mind that glorifies in deciding an issue without understanding it.”
    Rex Stout

  • 31 schmwarf // Oct 9, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    “Nothing succeeds like a budgie”
    - Anonymously scribbled in a UK public toilet

  • 32 CryptoKnight // Oct 18, 2011 at 11:05 am

    “Oh…I’m going to the special hell…”

    - Malcom Reynolds

  • 33 skzb // Nov 1, 2011 at 1:17 am

    “The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood–and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another.” — Dave Van Ronk

  • 34 Ethan // Nov 2, 2011 at 8:03 am

    Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. -Ayn Rand

  • 35 Dennis // Nov 2, 2011 at 9:25 am

    “The problem with quotes found on the internet is you have no way of confirming their authenticity.” – Abraham Lincoln

  • 36 Ethan // Nov 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm

    Fair enough, Here is the source for my quote:

    http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/middle_class.html#order_1

  • 37 skzb // Nov 2, 2011 at 6:35 pm

    I love that one, Dennis. Only it was Twain.

  • 38 Isalith // Dec 30, 2011 at 9:16 pm

    Malcom Reynolds-” Looks like we got here just in time, what does that make us?”

    Zoe- ” Big Damn Heroes Sir!”

    Malcom Reynolds- ” Ain’t we just.”

    Firefly Episode Titled : Safe

  • 39 Isalith // Dec 30, 2011 at 9:18 pm

    ” Two dead Teckla under your pillow” – Loish

  • 40 JP // Dec 31, 2011 at 12:37 pm

    Kate: “What was Sherlock Holnes’ priciple? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

    Dirk: I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks…. The first idea merely suppose something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therfore be suspicious of it, and all it’s specious rationality.”

    Douglas Adams, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”

  • 41 Dennis // Jan 3, 2012 at 4:51 pm

    @skzb Alas. Hoist by my own petard. Or something.

    The only thing worse than looking for authentic quotes on the internet is incorrectly attributing authentic quotes on the internet .–Oscar Wilde

  • 42 Mike Acuna // Jan 5, 2012 at 4:13 am

    I must make a point of telling Sethra not to underrate the power of the hissy-cow. – Vlad

  • 43 knob_e // Jan 28, 2012 at 3:16 am

    John Savage facing off against Controller Mustapha Mond on the subject of compulsory monthly Violent Passion Surrogate treatments as part of a state-provided health care plan:

    [Mond] “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

    “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

    “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

    “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

    – Aldous Huxley, *Brave New World*

  • 44 Cody Sheppard // Mar 29, 2012 at 2:51 pm

    “You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”
    The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

  • 45 Tzalaran // May 17, 2012 at 10:07 am

    “I’d rather hate myself for failing, than hate my life for never having tried.” – All That Remains

    “Success leads to stagnation. Stagnation leads to failure.” – Vlad Taltos

    “Do not let one’s tongue outrun one’s sense.” – Chilon

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