Quotes · Skopia

157 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Place·California✕clear

Scientific literature

Dinosaurs are a touchstone that separates the mentality of children from that of adults.

1989

★ 0.9

I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.

1936

★ 1.0

Interview · Magazine

A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

Paris Review · 1954

★ 1.0

Interview · TV program

Weightlessness is a great equalizer.

1984

★ 1.0

Military force—especially when wielded by an outside power—just cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself.

Robert McNamara

1995

★ 1.0

Essay · Magazine

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

2001

★ 1.0

Autobiography and memoir

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

The Year of Magical Thinking · 2005

★ 1.0

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.

1979

★ 1.1

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

1966

★ 1.2

I've often fantasized I would get a lot of writing done if I were put in prison for a minor crime. Three to six months.

2013

★ 1.2

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

1934

★ 1.8

Scientific literature · Political literature

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.

Luis Walter Alvarez

1967

★ 1.8

We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough... We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

1985

★ 1.8

Historical literature

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the priniples and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribbly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.

Robert McNamara

1995

★ 1.8

Film · Documentary (film)

We all make mistakes. We know we make mistakes. I don't know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he has not made a mistake. There's a wonderful phrase: "the fog of war." What "the fog of war" means is: war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.

Robert McNamara

2003

★ 1.8

Interview · Magazine

Art is a completed pass. You don't just throw it out into the world-someone has to catch it.

2013

★ 1.8

Interview · Newspaper

You should feel slightly incompetent at what you're trying to do. The minute you start to feel like an expert, what you really are is a hack.

Michael Cunningham

2014

★ 1.8

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

1907

★ 1.9

I have seen the future; and it works.

Lincoln Steffens

1919

★ 1.9

Song · Musical · Great American songbook

Look for the silver lining Whene'er a cloud Appears in the blue.

1920

★ 1.9

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