Quotes

I began collecting quotes a while back, here are a few I like.

Nihilism
At some point every intelligent, self aware mind becomes a nihilist. At that point you either kill yourself or you get over it.

NPR interview with some right wing nut job
"Married liberals have a lower birth rate because they abort their babies."

my friend Michael
"You’re just jealous ‘cause the voices only talk to me"

from the movie "Saved!"
"I know what you’re looking at Mary, and so does Jesus"

my friend Kevin
"There are so many beautiful and wonderful things out there right now. They just don’t necessarily have anything to do with people."

From The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley
"Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of referential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience."

From the preface to Hegel’s first book
"Nothing is easier than to judge what has substance and quality; to comprehend it is harder; and what is hardest is to combine both functions and produce an account of it."

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, II 1
"It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!"

Peter Mack
"Spilling your guts is as attractive as it sounds."

William F Buckley Jr.
"I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence."
"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive."

Frank Zappa
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

The West Wing
"You’re demons are shouting down your better angels"

Tanqueray commercial
"It’s no coincidence that the fist letter in Martini is "Mmmmmmmm!!"

Sibil’s psychiatrist
"Tell her it’s perfectly ok to think about killing herself, but could she please just wait until I get there"

Albert Einstein, 1954 "This I Believe" essay
"I sense that it is not the State that has intrinsic value in the machinery of humankind, but rather the creative, feeling individual -- the personality alone that creates the noble and sublime."