“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
“Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.”
“False fears are a plague, a modern plague!”
“Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.”
“When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?”
“Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.”
“Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.”
“Even if you don’t believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.”
“The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.”
“Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well.”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
“You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.”
“I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don’t.”
“Sometimes I think everyone's an attorney.”
“The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.”
“La actual preocupación casi histérica por la seguridad es en el mejor de los casos un derroche de recursos y un obstáculo para el espíritu humano, y en el peor de los casos una invitación al totalitarismo. Se necesita con urgencia educación pública.”
“Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,”
“The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half”
“Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The”
“based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,”
“If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.”
“They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems—because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.”
“I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.”
“Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.”
“But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”
“I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.”
“G.K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), “If you believe in nothing, you’ll believe in anything.” That”
“Save the Earth” and beneath that, “There’s Nowhere Else to Go.”
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. —MARK TWAIN”
“for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And”
“It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?”
“It’s a grace feather. See how its colors shift from green to blue, like the sea? It means remembrance. It shows that no distance, no amount of water between two people, will make them forget. Someone gave it to say that they remembered you.”
“Glory had her tail curled around her talons and was holding her wings in close as wave after wave of odd colors spread through her scales. Deathbringer put one wing around her, gently, and she let him.”
“I fall asleep with the sound of her voice echoing in my head, and a feeling in my chest like someone is scooping my heart out with a spoon.”
“How is it every time we're talking about the real world, you manage to bring up fantasy, and every time we're talking about fantasy, you manage to bring up the real world?
Travis shrugged. "My fantasies are more interesting than the real world and machines and tools are more interesting than you guys' fantasies.”
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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.