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BABYLON 5
"There is no normal life, Michael. There's just life."
RUSSELL BAKER
People who have the power to make things happen don't do the
things that people do, so they don't know what needs to happen.
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other
people have been left out of the pleasure.
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress
requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible
things.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage
to be gained from it.
Believe everything you hear about the world; nothing is too impossibly
bad.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching
the complaint a second time.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of
one friend that he is superior to the other.
J.M. BARRIE
Peter Pan
And off we skip like the most heartless things in the world,
for that is what children are, and have a most selfish time, and
when we feel in need of that special attention we nobly return
to it, confident that we will be embraced instead of smacked.
~~~
"I thought all the fairies were dead," Mrs. Darling said.
"There are always a lot of young ones," explained Wendy, who was
now quite an authority, "because you see when a new baby laughs
for the first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always
new babies there are always fairies. They live in nests on the
tops of trees; and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones
are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not
sure what they are."
Life is a long lesson in humility.
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something
else.
GERALD BARRY
Democracy: in which you say what you like and do what you're
told.
WAYNE R. BARTZ
The more ridiculous the belief system, the higher the probability
of its success.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Love is the desire to prostitute oneself.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by
ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from
despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing
oneself.
ANNE S. BAUMGARTNER
A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Gods
Idols: Statues that intolerant mortals assume are actually
thought to be gods. The intolerant mortals call their own idols
statues.
Incantation: A prayer: I pray, you make incantations, he
calls upon demons to produce heathen deviltry.
Magic: A form of science not acceptable to scientists because
they are unable to explain it.
Miracle: A supernatural event produced by the god or goddess
currently in power. When produced by any other god or goddess
it is called witchcraft.
Mythology: 1. A defunct religion. 2. A religion held in
disbelief by the person discussing it.
Occult: Unconventional religion. When a religion becomes
conventional, it is no longer considered to be occult. This is
known as scientific truth-seeking.
Theology: A rational discussion about gods. This is a contradiction
in terms.
SAMUEL BECKETT
That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
ERIC TEMPLE BELL
That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into
uncommon sense.
- Mathematics: The Queen of Sciences
GREGORY BENFORD
Any technology distiguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
BERNARD BERENSON
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant as you were a year
ago.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
LISA BERNBACH
Cynicism... more than a pose, it's also a handy time saver. By
deflating your companion's enthusiasm, you can cut conversation
in half.
- The Official Preppy Handbook
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Bore, n.: a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
~~~
Love, n: a temporary insanity curable by marriage or the
removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred
the disease... it is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the
physician than to the patient.
~~~
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting
of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.
Love seeketh only itself to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.
- Songs of Experience
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
IWAN BLOCH
I think all attempts to fight immorality are needless and double-edged,
for they never reach their goal. In addition to this they unfortunately
always endanger the freedom or science and art.
- Sexualleben unserer Zeit
NIELS BOHR
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can
be made in a very narrow field.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But
the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound
truth.
ROBERT BOLT
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated
gesture learnt from books.
- A Man for All Seasons
HENRY BOSTON
We need another, wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice,
man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge and sees, thereby, a feather magnified, and the
whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness,
for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err, for the animal shall not
be measured by man. In a world far older and more complete than
ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with senses we have
lost, or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not out brethren, they are not underlings; they are other
nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendour and travail of earth.
- The Outermost House
BORN TO HULA
A cell to an organism is what an organism is to an ecosystem
is what an ecosystem is to a planet is what a planet is to a solar
system is what a solar system is to a galaxy is what a galaxy
is to a god-knows-what.
Your sense of self comes from an artificial,
purely symbolic separation of the organism from the ecosystem,
a co-optation of the cell, molecule, proton and electron and so
forth, a disruption in the 'is to a' chain. Like a tree is not
really a tree, we assigned to it the meaning of tree. We're a
step, a link in a chain, proclaiming itself an entity all of its
own, separate from the whole. And then you wonder why you have
existential angst, why everyone goes in search of meaning, why
we invented god to give us a new framework to exist within after
we rejected and denied the one we're already members of. A soul
gives us coherence. It acts on a part of the whole we are so tightly
incorporated into, yanks us out, makes us freestanding. It's eternal,
it's distinct. It's also completely made up.
Your meaning cannot be self-contained. Just
like a person can't survive in a sealed plastic container, no
matter how efficient their organs.
MARY BORSELLINO
I think it's better to have a regular sort of life, and love
somebody when they're boiling gabbages and getting in tempers,
and curling up beside you in bed every night. That's a much better
kind of love than a pretty one that ends in sad and lovely paintings.
- Pretty Good Year
Awareness costs us innocence, that's the beauty and ache of it.
Winter and summer, you see, are things defined by each other.
But - as my uncle knew that afternoon and I know now, and now
and then are not so far apart as all that - the cost of a thing
is a measure of its value, and experience casts a particular kind
of sweet light over the small good things a life can hold.
- Mary Borsellino, West of the Moon: Swing
Textual Poaching, or fanfiction as it is more commonly known,
is a chance for the audience of a text to take a role in the creation
of tertiary elements within... yeah. That. Also known as 'nerdy
perverts make fictional characters bonk and have angst'.
GERALD BRENAN
Those who have some means think that the most important thing
in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.
- Thoughts in a Dry Season
LENNY BRUCE
Liberals can understand everything but the people who don't understand
them.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayar
Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs
people in it who can do neccesary evil, and yet not be made evil
by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question
the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
~~~~
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace
life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going
to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can
you win from life in addition to the pain?
~~~~
Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them
and then fail them was surely damnation.
~~~~
My home is not a place, it is people.
~~~~
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
~~~~
"A Count Vorkosigan has never been an experimental laboratory
animal, either."
"There you go, then. He serves Barrayar even before he's
born. Not a bad start on a life of honor."
A Civil Campaign
Nothing is more guaranteed to make one act like a child than
to be treated as one.
~~~~
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what
you know about yourself.
~~~~
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden;
only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean
something.
~~~~
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child.
You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect
to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay.
If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have
to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry
you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
~~~~
Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay
for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted,
and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will
bear.
~~~~
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them
gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's
a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body,
it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if
you possess or are possessed by one.
Ethan of Athos
"I doubt everything, you see."
Ethan thought this over. "Encountering the truth must be
horribly confusing for you, then."
Millisor's lips twitched dryly. "Fortunately, it happens
very seldom."
~~~~
"No Colonel. I remember Okita. I can understand a man being
a killer, I think. But a bored killer?"
"Okita is only a tool. The surgeon's knife."
"Then your service has turned a man into a thing." An
old quote drifted through Ethan's memory: By their fruits you
shall know them...
Memory
The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your
heart.
~~~~
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose
the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary
of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence
you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
~~~~
I am who I choose to be. I always have been what I chose…though
not always what I pleased.
Mirror Dance
I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob
dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around
him.
~~~~
Sometimes insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy
for survival. Sometimes... it's a triumph.
~~~~
Lives did not add as intergers. They added as infinities.
~~~~
I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow
is…the higher achievement.
~~~~
It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People
are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of
all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people.
There is none in the universe at large.
"Harder to make peace, between totally vile enemies,"
Miles reflected. "War is not its own end, except in some
catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's
wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with."
- The Vor Game
"Then don't wish to be normal," said Miles passionately, rising
to pace. "You'll only waste your precious time in futile frustration.
Wish to be great! That at least you have a fighting chance for.
Great at whatever you are. A great trooper, a great sergeant.
A great quartermaster, for God's sake, if that's what comes with
ease. A great musician like Nicol - only think how horrible if
she were wasting her talents trying to be merely normal."
- "Labyrinth"
SAMUEL BUTLER
The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to absurdity
by continually reducing absurdity to proof.
If God considered woman a fit helpmeet for man, he must have
had a very poor opinion of man.
All philosophies, if you ride them, are nonsense, but some are
greater nonsense than others.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument
as one goes on.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with
the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil.
The want of money is so quite as truly.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at
all.
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