“Only please, do be careful to bear in mind that Mordak’s a goblin. Enlightened, yes, but a goblin. He likes his employees loyal or lightly steamed on a bed of bruised rocket.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He turned and gave the Dark Elf a nasty look. “They can do that,” he said, “mess with your head, using arcane mind control techniques. Well-known fact.”
The Dark Elf sniggered. “I wish,” he said. “Sadly, no. You’re thinking of journalism, which is slightly different.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“After all, why be right when you can be happy.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He believes it’s time to redesign Evil from the ground up; to face the challenges and opportunities of a diverse, rapidly changing society.
“He’s thinking of calling it,” said Miss Gold, “New Evil.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“And if I’ve got to die, I want to die an editor.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Look not for too long into the doughnut, lest the doughnut look into you.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“The doughnut was definitely looking at him. Hello, sailor, it seemed to be saying.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Mordak has the mental clarity to recognise that when it comes to running a bureaucracy, Elves can achieve a degree of blinkered ruthlessness that makes goblins look like teddy-bears.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“He could hear rain pattering on the thatch, like a million mice line-dancing.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“Mr Winckler clapped his hands together. “Evil, as personified by me. Meet the new Dark Lord. But you can call me Albert.”
― Tom Holt, quote from The Good, the Bad and the Smug
“As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual... Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.”
― Václav Havel, quote from The Power of the Powerless
“When we pay attention to life, it is easy to recognize that every action has a consequence: when we cling, we suffer; when we act selfishly or violently, we cause suffering for ourselves or others. This is the teaching of karma: positive actions have positive outcomes; negative actions have negative outcomes.”
― Noah Levine, quote from Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
“with the exception of England, every other industrialized democracy has higher levels of income equality than the United States. Data from the OECD shows one consistent, general principle: The higher the taxes in a given country, the less inequality. This makes obvious and intuitive sense. Taxation is the primary method for redistribution, and as a general rule, the more taxation, the more redistribution; the more redistribution, the more equality. The United States collects a far smaller share of the national income in taxes than nearly every other industrialized democracy, and in recent years that rate has been dropping. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP in the United States is at 24.8 percent, down from 29.5 percent in 2000. You can compare that to Denmark, which has the highest level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP (48.2 percent) and the most equality out of any OECD country.15 Over the last thirty years or so we’ve seen rising inequality in pre-tax income, which means that before the government even starts its taxing, spending, and redistribution, there has been a profound and accelerating gap between high income earners and everyone else. The rich are earning more, while the non-rich’s earnings stagnate or decline. But these pre-tax earnings are run through the redistributive mechanisms of the state. And during the same time that pre-tax inequality has been growing, our tax system has grown less redistributive, further amplifying inequality rather than mitigating it. This”
― Christopher L. Hayes, quote from Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
“Now she saw them differently, not icy but deep, like a pond on a calm day when the surface seems hard at first, but something as small as a pebble can drop smoothly in, destroying the semblance of steel. Kira had dropped in, broken the surface of his soul, and she didn’t know when she would reach the bottom.”
― Kaitlyn Davis, quote from Ignite
“Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.”
― William T. Vollmann, quote from Europe Central
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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