“You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It’s really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you’ll find there’s not a lot of competition;”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Half a thou too small,” he said. “The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it’ld be Right. As it is, it’s Wrong, and you can’t cheat about it.” He smiled again. “Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn’t it?”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Many evils spring from power,” he said. “Even from the power to do good. All power corrupts, and the intention to do good has little influence on the corruption. Either my words will last after me and be believed by men, or else they won’t. Yet if one thing were required to kill them certainly, it is that my words should be spread after my death by the power of money. No teaching could survive a campaign of paid advertising.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“I still think Connie was a human man, a very, very good one—but a man. I have been wrong in my judgments many times before; if now I am ignorant and blind, I’m sorry, but it’s no new thing. If that should be the case though, it means that I have had great privileges in my life, perhaps more so than any man alive today. Because it means that on the fields and farms of England, on the airstrips of the desert and the jungle, in the hangars of the Persian Gulf and on the tarmacs of the southern islands, I have walked and talked with God.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Only by an act of treachery to those who believe in us can either of us escape.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
Nevil Shute
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 17, 1899
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“He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.”
― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“A conversation between Ellie and her mom:
[Ellie] "I guess it's true that love makes you blind."
"No," my mom said. "It doesn't make you blind. You're very, very aware of everything about the one you truly love, whether you know it from what your eyes tell you or your heart. So no, love doesn't make you blind. It paralyzes until you can't breathe or run away from it.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, quote from Wings of the Wicked
“Do you really want me to show you how you're pushing me, Tessnia? What you do to me?”
― Jalpa Williby, quote from Chaysing Dreams
“Throughout this entire story there remains one especially unsatisfactory feature: the observed masses of the particles, m. There is no theory that adequately explains these numbers. We use the numbers in all our theories, but we don't understand them-what they are, or where they come from. I believe that from a fundamental point of view, this is a very interesting and serious problem.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
“To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
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Leviathan
How the Irish Saved...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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