#lists

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates. ↗

— Arthur Smith

#advice #also #appalled #give #holidays

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists. ↗

— H. Allen Smith

#differs #his #human #human animal #lesser

I want to kill the president because I no like the capitalists. I have the gun in my hand, I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists. ↗

— Giuseppe Zangara

#capitalists #first #gun #hand #i

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#transcendentalists #men

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross. ↗

— Patrick White

#novelists #novels #voss-novel #dating

It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown. Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world. If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#dreamers #idealist #idealists #reality #secret

Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth--or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit. ↗

— John Lanchester

#families #free-spirits #idealists #laziness #wanderers

From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home. ↗

— D.G. Hart

#political #religious-right #home

Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible. ("The Wendigo") ↗

— Algernon Blackwood

#materialst #rational-thought #rationalists #rationality #intelligence

Finally, the president added, 'The American people are idealists, but they also want their leaders to be realistic... ↗

— Bob Woodward

#bob-woodward #idealists #leadership #obama-s-wars #president