"The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."

Baldwin, James on education
8 fans of this quote   

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."

Baldwin, James on education
3 fans of this quote   

"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."

Baldwin, James on education
4 fans of this quote   

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it."

Conrad, Joseph on empire   

"Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles."

Conrad, Joseph on exaggeration   

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

Conrad, Joseph on evil
6 fans of this quote   

"You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends."

Conrad, Joseph on enemies
6 fans of this quote   

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns."

Conrad, Joseph on dream   

"It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all."

Conrad, Joseph on emotions
3 fans of this quote   

"In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely."

Fisher, Geoffrey F. on loneliness
7 fans of this quote   

"Since the regimentation of Medicine by quacks and medical gangsters in control of the American Medical Association, this organization has become one of the most vicious rackets in the country."

Loffler, Charles Lyman on medicine   

"Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on medicine   

"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on memory
8 fans of this quote   

"No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on riches   

"Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."

Cervantes, Miguel De on enemies
10 fans of this quote   

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

Eco, Umberto on prophecy   

"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on death   

"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on children
3 fans of this quote   

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"To live by medicine is to live horribly."

Linnaeus, Carolus on medicine   

"They had me on the operating table all day. They looked into my stomach, my gall bladder, they examined everything inside of me. Know what they decided? I need glasses."

Lewis, Joe E. on medicine   

"Nor has his death the world deceiv'd than his wondrous life surprise d; if he like a madman liv'd least he like a wise one dy'd."

Cervantes, Miguel De on epitaphs   

"The eyes those silent tongues of love."

Cervantes, Miguel De on faces
6 fans of this quote   

"If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne."

Cervantes, Miguel De on fame
3 fans of this quote   

"He is mad past recovery, but yet he has lucid intervals."

Cervantes, Miguel De on fools and foolishness
4 fans of this quote   

"Sometimes the fool who rushes in gets the job done."

Bernstein, Al on fools and foolishness
4 fans of this quote   

"I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians."

Alexander The Great on medicine
3 fans of this quote   

"Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism."

Butler, Samuel on medicine   

"What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will."

Hippocrates on medicine   

"Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient's head to permit the escape of demons look relatively advanced. Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of pre-meditated murder, and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure."

Krebs, Jr., Ernst T. on medicine   

"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb."

Eco, Umberto on books - reading   

"There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him."

Eco, Umberto on torture
3 fans of this quote   

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."

Doctorow, E. L. on fiction   

"Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen."

Doctorow, E. L. on murder   

"You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again."

Doctorow, E. L. on sex
3 fans of this quote   

"In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment."

Doctorow, E. L. on state   

"The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."

Doctorow, E. L. on writers and writing   

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Doctorow, E. L. on writers and writing   

"We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books."

Hutchins, Robert M. on vision   

"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town."

Ondaatje, Michael on fiction