John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society
- Dead Poets society and 'very'
So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays.
Ursula Vernon
- Ed to Digger
Is long road, Mousie, is many turnings. It could have been leaving road many times, it... could have done many, many things. It is having seventeen years, long and long, to think of the things it could have done!
Lois McMaster Bujold
- Tests
...tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.
Lois McMaster Bujold
- Adulthood,
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
Lois McMaster Bujold
- You're good
You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.
Lois McMaster Bujold
- Pain, Barrayar, 1991
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
Lois McMaster Bujold
- Consequences and action
His mother had often said, when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
General Smedley Butler
- General Butlers long quote.
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914... I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
