Subjective Quotes (page 15)
The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley’s board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.
Cory Doctorow
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce? yes, announce? that Americans are sorely in need of more...
George Will
What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns
— what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?
Virginia Woolf
the very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite possibly to everyone else. Self is another dodgy concept, since I am, when I subject this 'I' to careful inspection, not much more than a flickering of affinities, habits, memories, and predilections that could go either way- towards neediness or independence for example courage or cowardice.
Barbara Ehrenreich
[Very rich people] with brains make a great effort to hold on to every penny they have while preaching to the general population that freedom and dignity and patriotism are possible only under their protection; in this way they elicit the support of the very people they hold in subjection.
James A. Michener
To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not...
Brian Aldiss