“...you can't let something that'll probably never happen ruin your life. You're only helping to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“...maybe we don't need a heavenly bribe or the fear of hell and damnation to make us behave decently. Maybe it would be healthier if people started believing in themselves instead.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“We're still dancing to tunes created by men who thought that a thunderstorm was a sig of God's anger.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Here we are, two thousand years later, with everything we’ve accomplished, everything we know, and yet this little talisman still rules the way billions of people live…and die.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Làm cái ghề như tôi thì khó có vợ lắm"
"Chà, hẳn rồi, nếu cái nghề đó cho phép anh nhảy lên máy bay với các cô gái chỉ mới quen biết. Tôi cũng hẳn chẳng muốn chồng mình làm điều đó hằng ngày”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Bế quan tỏa cảng với thế giới còn lại”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Ai trong chúng ta thực sự biết điều gì sẽ xảy ra với mình? Anh chỉ cần sống cuộc sống của mình và hi vọng vào những điều tốt đẹp nhất”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“What did it matter if it was based on a story that embellished the truth?”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“...beneath it all, religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning. And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we've become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“At the time, any science, as it was then called, was thought to be a challenge to the authority of the Church; a science that promised spiritual purification was a direct threat to the Church.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“Over a billion people out there, worshipping these writings, accepting every word as God’s own wisdom, slaughtering each other over them, and all of it without having the vaguest notion of where these scriptures really come from.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we’ve become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
“most expeditions lacked something Vance had at his disposal: the astrolabe,”
― Raymond Khoury, quote from The Last Templar
Raymond Khoury
Born place: in Beirut, Lebanon
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“There is no happiness where there is no wisdom...”
― Sophocles, quote from Antigone
“What do you know?”
“Almost everything. That almost part can be a real kick in the teeth sometimes.”
“What do you want, then?”
“What I can’t have.” Wit turned to him, eyes solemn. “Same as everyone else, Kaladin Stormblessed.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance
“Anything can happen. But almost always, just normal things happen and people have happy lives.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“Winter is coming, Elena," he said, and his voice was clear and chilling even over the howling of the wind, "An unforgiving season. Before it comes, you'll have learned what I can and can't do. Before winter is here, you'll have joined me. You'll be mine.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle
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The Ghost Map: The S...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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