Rebecca Pickavance > Rebecca's Quotes

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
― Ayn Rand

“And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."

[Blog post of July 26, 2011]”
― Jim C. Hines

“We all hold the keys to our own jail cells.”
― Paul Levine, Solomon vs. Lord

“When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.”
― Émile Durkheim

“...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Patriarchy has no gender.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

“We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”
― bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”
― Charles Bukowski

“dogs and angels are not
very far apart”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“She was desperate and she was choosey
at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what
she imagined herself to be.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting”
― Bukowski C.

“I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their
lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If I look back I am lost.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
― Alan Turing

“Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary…and if anything happens to him, you’ve got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before.”
― Alan Turing

“Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,
When I have no engagements written on my block,
When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,
When no one comes to take me away from myself
And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,
A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,
Being so contrived that it takes too long a time
To get myself back to myself when they have gone.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Homesick we are, and always, for another
And different world.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Garden

“Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can only tell you that I am shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation...”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Garden

“I cannot love your weeping poets...”
― Vita Sackville-West, Poems of West & East