“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
Matthew Reilly
Born place: in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Born date July 2, 1974
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“There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from The Bad Beginning
“What should we do? I was beginning to understand a few words of Spanish: to escape, fugar; prisoner, preso; to kill, matar; chain, cadena; handcuffs, esposas; man, hombre; woman, mujer.”
― Henri Charrière, quote from Papillon
“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, quote from Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from A Wizard of Earthsea
“Love Means Not Ever Having To Say You're Sorry.”
― Erich Segal, quote from Love Story
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Fade OutBookQuoters 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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