“The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.”
Regretful feeling
Regretful Quotes — page 73 of 169
“If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?”
“You can't lead me down that rode.”
“Real life is a funny thing, you know. In real life, saying the right thing at the right moment is beyond crucial. So crucial, in fact, that most of us start to hesitate, for fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But lately what I've begun to fear more that that is letting the moment pass without saying anything. I think most of us fear reaching the end of our life, and looking back, regretting the moments we didn't speak up. When we didn't say "I love you." When we should've said "I'm Sorry." When we didn't stand up for ourselves or some one who needed help.”
“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
“Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
“The wisest persons, surprised by some passion, often say things they later regret.”
“Laws must never be made compatible with crimes, no more than lying should be in harmony with the truth.”
“The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children.”
“Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself”
“I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married”
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”
“Those who don't build must burn.”
“For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule.”
“Let's drop the whole 'atheist evangelism' thing and call out bullshit questions like 'what does atheism have to offer?' for just what they are: Bullshit. I mean, what does knowing that the Earth goes around the Sun have to offer? Who cares? It just is.”
“There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.”
“Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.”
“I don't think I have any regrets, but I can tell you what I learned from mistakes or failures. I've had plenty of those. I just don't believe in regret, and my economic world is not what I would ever have imagined; I'm financially free.”