Quotes Looking for An Article

""I'm being quoted to introduce something, but I have no idea what it is and certainly don't endorse it.""

- Randall Munroe

Have you discovered a page that doesn't begin with a quote, and you want to rectify that situation? Perhaps one of these quotes might be appropriate.

If you use or see a quote from this page on another page, please remove the quote from this page.

Anime and Manga
"Reimu: Sorry Bean throwing is canceled this year. Even though I asked you to play the Oni [...] Suika: No-no way! I even dressed up as an Oni!"

- Wild and Horned Hermit

"Marisa: Ah... Sorry for not meeting expectations. Alice & Patchouli: We weren't expecting anything. Marisa: Ah... I see."

- Omoito (a Touhou doujin)

""Constellations of stars that I am seeing for the first time… you are all only allowed to exist as objects for my conquest and rule. Just wait.""

- Reinhard von Lohengramm, Legend of the Galactic Heroes

""There is nothing more noble and beautiful than a warrior with no distractions. One could say he is the closest thing to God.""

- Treize Khushrenada, Gundam Wing

""Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire.""

- Rei Ayanami, Neon Genesis Evangelion

"''"Doctor Tenma. For you all lives are created equal, that’s why I came back to life. But you’ve finally come to realize it now, haven’t you? Only one thing is equal for all, and that is death.""

- Johan Liebert, Monster (manga)

""Immortality is wasted on the young.""

- Alucard, Hellsing

""Romance [...] is flexible in that it can act as the central reason to include an array of props. Want tension? Create awkward scenarios that sprout from romance. Mind some comedy? There are countless cliché gags based on a romantic relationship. Want to keep a healthy male fan base? Add girls, some naughty camera angles, and you’ve got yourself a steady audience. Romance is versatile, but requires a lot of characterization and work on the story. Some anime producers decided that these weren’t important, but liked the broad spectrum of actions that romance covered. So they included the drama, comedy, and fan-service, but left out the tedious process of developing a proper romance.""

- Austin, Anime: The World of Fake Romance (The Artifice)

""Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people discovered anime through [Carl] Macek's work, including a lot of the fans who went on to found North America's anime industry. You could make the case that the popularization of anime might have happened anyway, but the fact is, Macek was the one who did it.""

- Christopher Macdonald, CEO and editor-in-chief of Anime News Network, The 'Robotech' master

"We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood; blessed are those with a voice."

- Major Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence

Fan Works
"When I write things like this I'm not advocating them. If I advocated everything I write, I wouldn't be able to write racist characters, murder or bullying – let alone all the killing my stories have. I write stories. I write conflict. I write villages destroyed by Grimm and both men and women sometimes being bastards and using their influence to make other people's lives unhappy. I've written Mercury stealing a kiss from Ruby and Cinder seducing Jaune to use as nothing more than a sex toy (in Stress Relief), and ironically people were fine with the latter but a kiss on the former is totally not okay. Anyway, me writing those things doesn't mean I go around bribing women to kiss me and then dragging innocent young men to bed. It just means I'm writing characters who aren't your typical goodies."

- Coeur Al'Aran

"Did I feel guilty about stealing an ancient heritage and taking out a patent on it? Not after I saw the company's monthly balance sheet."

- GremlinJack

Film
""It’s a tiny bit arrogant of people to go around worrying about those less fortunate.""

- Nick Smith

"John 'The Hangman' Ruth: Major Marquis Warren, this here is Daisy Domergue. Domergue, to you, this is Major Warren. Daisy Domergue: Howdy, nigger. John 'The Hangman' Ruth: [laughing] She's a pepper, ain't she? Now, girl, don't you know darkies don't like being called niggers no more? They find it offensive. Daisy Domergue: I've been called worse. John 'The Hangman' Ruth: Now, that I can believe."

- The Hateful Eight

""In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. "Taxi Driver" suggests that tragic errors can be made.""

- Disclaimer from the TV broadcast of Taxi Driver

Literature
"No one wants to know a wizard... until they have a problem. Then it's different"

- Max Schreiber

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment"

- Rita Mae Brown

""I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.""

- Jeanette Winterson

""I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.""

- Dorothy Parker

""For a fellow who’s not too much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion.""

- Salman Rushdie

""The Good and Great must ever shun That reckless and abandoned one Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.

"The man that smokes--that reads the Times - That goes to Christmas Pantomimes - Is capable of ANY crimes!""

- Lewis Carroll

""[...] it is invariably the case that actions bright and exciting in the imagination are, unfortunately, often disappointing or farcical in practice, more so when they have not been thought through thoroughly. Deep thinking gives people a headache. They think they are thinking when in fact they are merely daydreaming. For instance, if you were to ask them what they thought of ‘adventure,’ they would express a vague, undefined pro-adventure attitude, as practically everyone does, albeit from the comfort of an easy chair. They equate, or confuse, their liking for the idea of adventure with an ability to possibly participate in the real thing. Whereas, in practice, they might immediately discover that real adventure — of the neck-on-the-line variety — is unsettling, like entering a fourth dimension where the comfortable laws and rules they take for granted in normal life no longer apply; adrenaline speeds the pumping blood and distorts the faculties; immersion in the immediacy of action obviates wider appreciation. Riding the whirlwind is an acquired taste. The psyche aspires to accommodate the new perspective of both inner and external vision. The more times you act as supreme architect, the more you become one.""

- Ian Brady

"I know there are spares among us. Where are the spares? Are we a troop together or a band of savages?"

- Stilgar

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

- Karl Popper

"Ptraci didn't just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap."

- Terry Pratchett

"''Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer's ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and to mystify the familiar — all this is the test of her or his power."

- Toni Morrison

"Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it."

- Toni Morrison

"I'm free from pain. It's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing."

- Toni Morrison

"You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."

- Toni Morrison

"My grandfather bragged all the time that he had read the Bible. And it was illegal in his life to read. Ultimately I knew that words have power."

- Toni Morrison

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

- Toni Morrison

"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another."

- Toni Morrison

"If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."

- Toni Morrison

"Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were. And I wasn't afraid to show it."

- Toni Morrison

"The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided — something about their presence is constructive in the long run. Sula, for instance, was someone the other characters missed terribly when she was gone, even though she was the pariah. In Love, Junior is a poor, rootless, free-floating young woman — a survivor, a manipulator, a hungry person — but she does create a space where people can come with their better selves."

- Toni Morrison

"This was brand-new space, and once I got there, it was like the whole world opened up, and I was never going to give that up. I felt original. I hate to admit that because it sounds so self-regarding, I didn't feel like an original human being, but the work was original. You know that feeling — that if you don't write it, it will never be written? You think, Eudora Welty can't do it, only you."

- Toni Morrison

"Complicity in the subjugation of race and class accounts for much of the self-sabotage women are prey to, for it is straight out of that subjugation that certain female-destroying myths have come."

- Toni Morrison

"The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can invent, imagine and most importantly, it can delve."

- Toni Morrison

"An instant later, I was rushing to prepare an entrenchment, practically crying. I never dreamed there might be a day a trowel would seem so important to me."

- Visha's POV

"What I learned at a very early age was that I was responsible for my life. And as I became more spiritually conscious, I learned that we all are responsible for ourselves, that you create your own reality by the way you think and therefore act. You cannot blame apartheid, your parents, your circumstances, because you are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything."

- Oprah Winfrey

Live-Action TV
""At some point, you have to make a decision. Boundaries don't keep other people out. They fence you in. Life is messy. That's how we're made. So, you can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them. But there are some lines that are way too dangerous to cross.""

- Dr. Meredith Grey

"We all know that artists are the epitome of mental health."

- Stephen Colbert (joking)

""Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.""

- Jamie Kellner, then-chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, in an interview with Cableworld, April 29, 2002

""It's the people's will. I am their leader. I must follow them.""

- Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington)

Music
"''"All of us get lost in the darkness ''Dreamers learn to steer by the stars ''All of us do time in the gutters Dreamers turn to look at the cars""

- Rush, The Pass

""On reflection it seems ironic and perhaps fitting that a series of musical pieces exploring themes of loss and melancholia should in themselves be impacted upon by an unexpected experience of loss ...""

- An Imaginal Space, on "Loss"

"Lost - another time we found now the power Crash - into a world of darkness and light Dust - of thousand stars into the reactor Life comes from death - blankness from light"

- Core Domain by Thunderblast

""That alert-sounding siren doesn't always have to go off at the start of a beat track; the sound of the beat nearly gives it away on its own.""

- CVoss on J Dilla, Rate Your Music

"No, I do not believe roses only bloom just to conceal the thorns. I merely accept the thorn pricked finger bleeds."

- Think The Adder Benign by Shai Hulud

New Media
"Imagining other dragons Edrilanish would regard as her elders feels strange. Of course, everybody was young at some point, but imaging her as anybody but the Dragon Queen is almost surreal."

- nobody_here

Radio
""Underground radio meant something because it said something ...""

- Pioneer FM deejay Charles Laquidara.

""[The Canadian radio industry] frustrates me so much. I want to see it flourish, I want to hear great material being produced by quality radio hosts, but instead it’s amateur hour all throughout the country as the corporations slash budgets and hire people fresh out of school (or who never even went to school) who aren’t ready to be in front of the mic in markets that should only be hiring seasoned veterans…""

- A Dose of Buckley, Radio Hypocrisy

Video Games
""The truth, Walker, is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: A hero.""

- Spec Ops: The Line

""You're a disgusting, MMO-addicted NEET hermit... and I'm your beloved little sister!""

- Rikana, Mix Ore

"''"You can't talk yourself out of loneliness, it doesn't work that way. ''You can't be the one writing both the questions and the answers, then there's no movement! Then there's no circulation! If all of your anxieties are being channeled into your work, then if the work ever fails you have no backup and you're just going to crash.""

- Davey Wreden of The Stanley Parable fame, on the dialogue of one of Coda's games, The Beginner's Guide

""Their catch phrase for EOS Online is "For the MMORPG that you've lost." The only thing that I have lost while testing this game is interest.""

- Steparu Review

""While Clannad certainly has a bunch of the generic "lol Japan is perverts", I'd be hard-pressed to call it a game designed for porn. I mean, if you enjoy masturbating to your own tears, that's not the game's fault.""

- Ad__Hominem, Reddit (r/KotakuInAction, So the ABC tv show Good Game just did an episode on sex in games...)

""Who'd of thought it, huh? A bunch of small towners like us wrapped up in an adventure like this.""

- Olivia, Minecraft: Story Mode

""It's one of those games that seems to do exactly what it set out to do. Neverending Nightmares does indeed trap you in a seemingly never-ending cycle of wandering halls and avoiding monsters. It just does it in a far more tedious and uninteresting way than your own mind would.""

- Audish, Steam review of Neverending Nightmare

Web Comics
"Alexia Murtaugh: Made in good faith, that offer puts us under Samaritan clauses. BOOM. We're here legally. Kevyn Andreyasn: Are we the good guys if we're this crafty about being the good guys? Alexia Murtaugh: I'm a career good-guy. This qualifies as "justifiably crafty righteousness"."

- Schlock Mercenary

"Daisy: What's the cure for falling down the stairs? Cooper: Falling back up the stairs? Daisy: That's still in clinical trials! You could lose your license!"

- Daisy Owl

"Elan: Oh no! Roy's been staggered! Or possibly stunned! Maybe dazed? Dazzled? I know it's one of the swoopy-star conditions, not one of the swirly-eye ones."

- The Order of the Stick

"Riff: You realize you are about a year off from that joke being topical. Torg: Some jokes never get old. Riff: Others are born that way."

- Sluggy Freelance

Web Original
"Revari: I was wrong. At this price, you're not a thief. You're an extortionist. Kaya: Exorcist, your grace It's pronounced exorcist."

- https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/laid-rest-2016-08-03

"You took the vikings all the way to North America. Where in North America we're not quite sure, but we are pretty sure you did go there. There was some raiding, some trading, some strife with indigenous people, and then, you didn't settle the land and kill 95% of American Indians. And for that Lief Erikson: I Say Good Job."

- John Green

""1) Does it have bass? 2) Does it blow your fucking mind? Then it's Future Bass. It's not a genre, it's a state of mind.""

- r/futurebass description, Reddit

"Luigi: Guys, I think I found the switch to the lasers. Mario: How can you be sure? Luigi: There's a sign below the switch that says "Lazerz." Sonic: What a goddamn genius!"

- Mario & Luigi: The Great Castle Heist! (Machinima)

""You know, there's a really thin line between "YouTube Challenge" and "Snuff Fetish Film.""

- Andre the Black Nerd (Black Nerd Comedy), WORST OF 2015: Black Nerd Rants

""'A very important message from a shark.' Somehow, I don't think these two things belong in the same sentence."

- TheMysteriousMrEnter, Tentacolino Review

"Yeah, that's right, this site's under construction. I feel I must tell you this by posting multiple "under construction" images in case you didn't notice that it was "under construction" that way I don't feel as bad leaving it "unfinished.""

- shitty.website

""The Internet has brainwashed these teenagers, to the point where that's all they talk about when they're not on it. If only this wasn't accurate...""

- YourMovieSucks, Megan is Missing review

""The modern information age got such a jump start from the "calculator wars" that it's bizarre that it isn't discussed in any more depth than it is.""

- LGR Tech Tales - The Calculator Wars

""Didn't they, like, put ads in a reaction video to a little girl's suicide video and a school shooting?""

- Steve (a human being with empathy), Finebros React (Psychicpebbles short)

"''"We're reacting to ourselves now? That's so useless and redundant. (happy shrug) Why didn't we think of it before?!"''"

- Rafi Fine, Finebros React (Psychicpebbles short)

""[Changes in modern media, compared to old works, make] the story reflect the sensibilities of a modern audience. Fiction is [a] product of culture, and culture is a product of circumstance. Our circumstances now are not the same as they were in classical times, so neither is our culture and neither is our fiction.""

- MrBtongue, Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage: Genre vs. Literature

""Tropers have no sense of subtlety, ambiguity, or suggestion. These are some of the most important parts of poetry.""

- The Triumphant, The Problem With Poetry on TVTropes

""There was a point in the early 90's when people thought the internet was going to create a global forum for the spread of new ideas, that it would make national boundaries and old prejudices irrelevant. Indeed people attached an almost utopian significance to it. The global village was no longer a theory but a reality. Fast forward about 20 odd years and we use it to watch videos of fat men eating junk food and vomiting"

- feedtheoctopus, Kiwi Farms thread about JoeysWorldTour

""[LeafyIsHere]'s actually been coming out of his shell quite a bit recently [as of late 2016]. He's making more 'facecam' videos- I love that too, by the way, calling 'em 'facecam' videos. You know, for the rest of the planet who isn't afraid to show their face, we just call 'em 'videos'.""

- iDubbbzTV, Content Cop - Leafy

"LucasSomething: [...] [I] just love how Youtube drama has become a shounen anime where every month you discover that the villain was actually being manipulated by an even stronger villain. Leafy backstabbing Keemstar to avoid getting hate is getting him much more hating than if he sided with Keemstar. Oh the irony... StarvingAutist: It's like Death Note, but with dank memes."

- Kiwi Farms thread about LeafyIsHere

"Do you have a brain, or does that mustache go all the way to the center?"

- Imp, Shamus Plays WoW #1: It’s an Imp’s Life

"Naturally I object to this plan on moral grounds. As in: It’s moral, therefore we shouldn’t be wasting our time with it."

- Imp, Shamus Plays WoW #7: The Cataclysm Begins!

"Anonymous: apollodown has hidden their mods in reaction to american politics. On a scale of beyond 10 to beyond 10, how utterly retarded is this move? trainwiz: That’s like killing your cat in response to Hurricane Matthew."

"Can you hear that? I can hear it. That's the sound of every former British service member cringing at the mere sight of this rifle and it's so loud that you can hear it over the internet."

- Ian McCollum on the L85A1, Forgotten Weapons

"Magdalene Visaggio: I think it's genuinely fucked up that @aubreysitterson is being hounded out of comics for speaking his mind in a non-hateful way. Diversity in Comics: He literally decided he was the referee of who got to mourn 9/11. There is nothing more hateful than that."

- Diversity in Comics tears apart a hit article on him.

"(though my favorite negative review is, and always will be, the guy who said the Grimnoir trilogy was just ripping off the X-Men when I had FDR try to round up over a hundred thousand people who were considered scary to put them in concentration camps. Holy crap.)"

- Larry Correia, "Some Reactions to Sad Puppies 2: Rainbow Puppy Lighthouse The Huggening"

"I've written about strange writing formats before, but this one drives me crazy. It's the "3 point writing system." I will give an extremely condensed example here:
 * I am going to explain that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
 * All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
 * I have just explained that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.

There really isn't much to it. The format works like this: It's horrible. Please stop doing that."
 * 1) Say what you're going to say.
 * 2) Say it.
 * 3) Say you said it.

- Charles Eicher, 3 Point Writing

"Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices? You'd be lucky if it survives until next Thursday"

- Alistair Dabbs, The Register, 28 Jun 2019

"The Nuremberg defence is something typically saved until things are really bad, but in this case the PFY has decided to use it as our opening gambit."

- Bastard Operator From Hell, 18 Oct 2019

"Because clearly the UK government is really, really scared of ninjas. They're not scared of gangs stabbing each other with kitchen knifes or shooting each other, but they are really, really scared of ninjas. [...] the UK government is frikin terrified of ninjas. Gangs, terrorists, not a problem. Ninjas are the real problem that we're facing today, or at least in 1988."

- Matt Easton, UK Weapon Laws: 19 Offensive Weapons - Nonsensical?

Western Animation
""Sometimes, you need to take responsibility for your own happiness. It takes a long time to realize how truly miserable you are, even longer to see it doesn't have to be that way. Only after you give up everything can you begin to find a way to be happy.""

- Cuddlywhiskers, BoJack Horseman ("BoJack Kills")

"Welcome workers of Nazi Land. What a glorious privilege is yours, to be a Nazi. To work 48 hours a day for the Fuehrer."

- Der Fuehrer's Face

Other
"you're a very very healthy fifty-five-year-old man, except, of course, for the brain cancer"

- Anne Lamott's Father's oncologist

"''"You see people, the truly ironic thing about all of this, is that going to College/University was supposed to be about expanding young minds. Helping them to broaden their own experiences and give them the best possible start in life. A new perspective; a chance to grow. Now it seems to be more about hiding new experiences from them and reinforcing their own pre-conceptions. Instead of preparing them for reality, we're teaching them to be reality ignorant.""

- Kleyno, Dr. Frankenstein regrets creating his monster: Even Salon.com thinks trigger warnings have ruined college (Voat thread)

"Nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy. ("Not my circus, not my monkey.")"

- Polish proverb

""The aquarium was once the best way to encounter the wonders of sea life. It has become a mere travesty, tacky and cruel.""

- Subtitle for Through a Glass, Sadly by Bernd Brunner

""The truth is our standards for what a “successful relationship” should be are pretty screwed up. If a relationship ends and someone’s not dead, then we view it as a failure, regardless of the emotional or practical circumstances present in the person’s lives. And that’s kind of insane.""

- Mark Manson, Healthy Relationships Habits Most People Think are Toxic (Quartz article)

"''"China Is Banning Erotic Banana Eating on Live Streams But what of cucumbers?"''"

- Headline and Subtitle of a 2016 article by Erik Shilling on Atlas Obscura

"''"My five-year-old son just got a trophy for soccer. I was as pleased as any father could be, and I pulled him on my lap, and praised him. Then I figured out everyone got a trophy. All my praise turned to lies in my mouth. I could not unsay what I had just said to a five-year-old. I could not tell him that this trophy was meaningless. ''I could not tell him to try his best, either, because the reward was the same for his best as for his worst. ''My other son quit the team before the season ended, and the coach wanted to give him a trophy in any case. I was revolted by the idea, deeply offended. ''They are trying to make my sons into little, weak, selfish, puling nonentities: boys who will cry if they do not get the same reward for hard work as for goofing off. Boys who will grow up to think life is unfair unless they are handed everything they never earned on a silver platter. I cannot regard this attempt with anything but a deep mistrust, bordering on hatred. Who are these people, and what do they have against my boys? Why are they trying to spoil them?""

- John C. Wright, If everyone is Super, no one will be

""Kafkaesque doesn't even begin to describe how fucked up this is. Those poor kids are going to have their lives ruined because some fuckwad at the police station decided that was the only charge they could stick on them. Our legal system is too fucked up to even repair at this point. It's become a series of depressing stories like this highlighting how broken it is but, until people are impacted by it themselves, most are not willing to raise their voices and demand change.""

- Bananassassin, Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself (Voat thread)

""Transcendental meditation is for human beings, and it transforms life for the good, no matter who you are or what your situation is. For instance, everybody knows education is pretty bad shape these days. There's lots of problems, even in the so-called "good" schools. Stress is hitting kids at a younger and younger age, and there's bullying, there's fights, there's legal and illegal drugs, there's bad relationships, bad grades, nobody likes to learn, there's teacher burnout, and it's kind of a mess. People have tried many things to help, but in my opinion, lots of these good things are surface cures--they don't address the torment inside the student, or the teacher, or the principal. When they get this transcendental meditation, it's a mental techique that allows them to dive deep within to the deepest level of life, which underlies all matter and mind. At the border of intellect, you transcend and experience that unbounded level of life: all positive, pure consciousness with qualities of intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, and peace. I like to say gold flows in and garbage goes out.""

- David Lynch, 25 February 2014 Q&A on Rolling Stone

"Everybody laughs in the same language."

- Anonymous

""Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.""

- Helen Keller

"We see several German soldiers in a bunker, who in order to receive the American guest have borrowed old uniforms from a military museum. Their faces express at once both desperation and cheerfulness."

- Das schwarze Korps (Newspaper for SS members) review of Superman comic

"For the first edition, I exchanged a few e-mails with him, directly and indirectly, and then the finished books were run past him to be approved and, as he put it, sprinkled with fairy dust. I'm happy and honoured to say that he didn't feel that they needed much from him. (Actually, he threatened me with assassination. But in a very flattering way.)"

- Phil Masters, discussing his (minimal) interaction with Terry Pratchett while writing GURPS Discworld

"For example, the first draft had numbers for a couple of siege engines. But then the manuscript looked to be running long, and I thought "Hang on - a ballista or a cannon will either be something in the background in a wartime siege scene, in which case it's a symbol that stuff just got real and something not to stand in front of, or as a Chekhov's Gun that will show up as a piece of furniture in scene 1 because there'll be a giant monster on the rampage in scene 3, in which case it does Enough Damage To Kill A Giant Monster. So let's not waste that space.""

- Phil Masters, discussing writing The Discworld Roleplaying Game

"Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage"

- Winston Churchill

""Here’s how bad [the school environment in universities has] gotten, for reals: last summer [of 2015], I agonized over whether or not to include texts about climate change in my first-year comp course. They would have fit perfectly into the unit, which was about the selective production of ignorance and the manipulation of public discourse. But I decided against including them. They forced readers to come to uncomfortable conclusions. They indicted our consumption-based lifestyles. They called out liars for lying. Lots of uncomfortable stuff. All it would take was one bougie, liberal student to get offended by them, call them triggering, and then boom, that’s it, that’s the end of me. So... yeah. This is what call out culture has begot. An academic climate where teachers are afraid to make students think, and where academics themselves are afraid to say a single word that bucks the status quo. Congrats, guys. You’ve won.""

- White Hot Harlots, A personal account of how call out culture has harmed teaching

""Turning social justice into a joke, one vapid tweet at a time.""

- Intelligent Calcium on Brianna Wu's use of Twitter, Kiwi Farms thread

"So since it's impossible to know what the future will actually look like, that's a defense for writing nonsense. Let's apply this to other genres: "Since it's impossible to know exactly what everyday life was like in the Roman Empire, I can go ahead and write a historical novel where Romans watched Desperate Housewives.""

"Most college sophomores in their first philosophy class will walk in with the argument that “it’s all relative” and that no research, argument, or discussion can alter our preconceptions. That’s why we call them sophomoric."

- Michael Schudson

"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff

"“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.” “There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.” “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”"

- Gustave Gilbert

"With what words, O writer, will you describe with similar perfection, the entire configuration which the drawing here does?"

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company."

- René Descartes

""As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture.""

- Elizabeth II

"Maybe people in America think being a 'Sir' is a big deal. But I think we should all be misters together. I think the 'Sir' thing slightly perpetuates one of our diseases in England, which is snobbery. And it also helps keep us 'quaint,' which I'm not a great fan of."

- Albert Finney (who turned down a knighthood when it was offered to him)

"That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans: A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him? I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true."

- Terry Pratchett

""I would sooner have a foot in my mouth than a forked tongue.""

- John Crosbie, February 1, 1979

""And to those of you who do not support me, I will bear no grudge — as long as I don't know who you are.""

- John Crosbie, 1983

""Mr. Speaker, I am glad the honourable gentleman finally got around to asking me about this question, because if you want an answer, you have to go to the horse's mouth.... In this case, Mr. Speaker, the other end of the horse asked the question.""

- John Crosbie, November 29, 1984

""I was never politically correct. I tried to speak my mind, and while it's not possible in politics or practical, always to be truthful and to answer questions truthfully, because it can be too politically damaging. I did try to be truthful wherever I could, and frank, and so sometimes you become an endangered species if that's the way you are.""

- John Crosbie, 2004

"The best antidote for fear is competence - knowing what to do."

- Chris Hadfield, on Twitter, March 18, 2020

"My own conviction is that every leader should have enough humility to accept, publicly, the responsibility for the mistakes of the subordinates he has himself selected and, likewise, to give them credit, publicly, for their triumphs."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

""I have no illusions of the future. Or maybe it's all illusion. I don't know. I've always been ready for it.""

- Gord Downie

""Ooh, look at me, I looked up a quote!""

- Randall Munroe