Believing Quotes (page 174)
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In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
John Steinbeck
It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives...
Kurt Vonnegut
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
Ralph Ellison
No: that fear had been inside him for manyyears, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over hisown shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as hehad always believed, but an immediate reality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
No amount of money,
Can stop me from loving you,
Try as they may,
Try as they might,
I’m not letting go,
Without a fight,
Some say it’s wicked,
Some say it’s sinful,
Some it’s wrong,
And just wrong,
I don’t know much,
But when push comes to shove,
I definitely don’t believe,
There’s such thing wrong as love.
Chris Colfer
She was staring at the low ceiling, and I had the feeling that there was another Severian there, the kind and even noble Severian who existed only in Dorcas’s mind. All of us, I suppose, when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.
Gene Wolfe