Harmless Quotes (page 3)
After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie. But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought, 'That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly.' I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I'd heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.
Augusten Burroughs
It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and...
Henry James
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing...
Vladimir Lenin
His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.
Ambrose Bierce
We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
Carl Bernstein
Out of a hundred people:
Those who always know better- 52
Doubting every step- all the rest
Glad to lend a hand if it doesn’t take too long- as high as 49
Always good, because they can’t be otherwise- 4 maybe 5
Able to admire without envy- 18
Living in constant fear of something or someone- 77
Capable of happiness- 20 something tops
Harmless singly, savage in crowds- half at least
Wise after the fact- just a couple more than wise before it
Taking only things from life- 30 (I wish...
Wislawa Szymborska