“There’s an Oriental saying I like: “If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“I snorted. ‘For a great sultan who is lord and ruler of all that he surveys, his English is lamentably poor. He can’t even spell England properly.’
Still holding the note, Mr Ascham looked up at me. ‘Is that so? Tell me, Bess, do you speak his language? Any Arabic or Turkish-Arabic?’
‘You know that I do not.’
‘Then however lamentable his English may be, he still speaks your language while you cannot speak his. To me, this gives him a considerable advantage over you. Always pause before you criticise, and never unduly criticise one who has made an effort at something you yourself have not even attempted.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“So it is with Moslem women and their veils,’ Michelangelo said. ‘When they saw Muhammad’s wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“That’s not the whole of it. As with many other faiths—including our own Christian one—a small group of zealots have distorted Islam to further their own agenda. When many women took to imitating the fashions of the Prophet’s wives, some Moslem men saw an opportunity to put all women under their thumb. They espoused foul laws like those allowing a man to beat his wife or force her into his bed.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“The Church’s war against women occurred not under Christ—who by all accounts held women as equals to men—but through the writings of St Irenaeus and Tertullian, and that most cruel woman-hater of them all, St Paul, whose hostile views on women were unfortunately included in the Bible. But let me be clear, it is not only a Catholic problem; it is a Christian one: Martin Luther, the scourge of the old Church, shares its views on women. He once wrote: “Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops.” Weeds! Weeds!”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“The problem, as I see it, are the twin human creations of marriage and religion. It is marriage and religion that make copulation complex and hurtful. Marriage brings up notions of trust, cuckoldry and ownership, while religion makes certain kinds of intimacy sinful.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“What people do in the name of religion is not necessarily religious. It often has baser reasons behind it.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“But it was not the note that counted so much as the writing of it.
Just because it wouldn’t last forever out there didn’t mean it hadn’t
existed. that’s why I was there. I was there for a moment. And
because of a string of beautiful moments spent at that very same
place, moments I would keep inside me wherever I went.”
― Amanda Howells, quote from The Summer of Skinny Dipping
“نحن جزء من مقاصد الله المعقّدة التي تتجلّى بطرق لا نفهمها دائماً ~ مريم”
― Nahid Rachlin, quote from Persian Girls
“My mom tries to comfort me by saying that girls like Heather Campbell tend to peak early in life and then quickly fade. That's why she looks so much better than everyone now. But by the time I go to my ten-year reunion, I'll be way prettier than she is. To which I always reply with the same statement, "I don't want to be pretty in ten years. I want to be pretty now."
Because what good is it to me now that I might or might not be drop-dead gorgeous when I'm twenty-seven? It's not like I can go to school every day with a big cardboard sign around my neck that says, "Trust me, in ten years, I'll look like this." And then an arrow pointing to a picture of a supermodel.”
― Jessica Brody, quote from The Karma Club
“The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies—open and undisguised—seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement.”
― Leon Trotsky, quote from History of the Russian Revolution
“They were two people staring at each other knowingly, communicating psychically amidst an ocean of deaf, dumb and blind meatsacks.”
― Travis Luedke, quote from The Nightlife: Las Vegas
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