James Rozoff Quotes

People today are used to seeing not only the incredible but the impossible as well, all provided by the mega-pixel. We witness miracles and dismiss them as diversions. The line between reality and fantasy has been blurred to the point that we no longer know what it is we see, and so put little faith in the experience. And there is no darkness anymore, no place for things like mystery and magic to make their abode. There is nothing nowadays that is not exposed, caught on camera and pixilated to be stored and classified forever in some phantom zone called cyber space. Nothing is too small to remain unseen by our microscopes or too far away to be seen by our satellites. The world is a strumpet, every inch of her exposed and explored. Whether she is thrusting herself into the camera's gaze, or we as voyeurs intrude upon her most intimate moments, nothing is left to the imagination. The world today is all light and no darkness. But too much light can blind. An excess of it deprives our eyes from the necessary contrast required to give definition to what we see. The light precludes magic, gives us explanations in its place. It denies love and informs us of the chemicals in the brain that are active given certain conditions. We have gained knowledge but in the process we have been forced to surrender the very reasons we sought knowledge in the first place.

Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined.

Before Ayn Rand coined the term "objectivists", we just called them "selfish assholes".

He who dies with the most toys...dies a child.

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

It really was amazing, thought Mindy, the way modern electronics made it so easy to ignore those people who were physically so close.

The town they entered differed little from any other he had been in lately. The ubiquitous Perkins, Applebees, Buffalo Wild Wings, Qdoba, and Panda Express were situated around the central hub that was Walmart, like appendages of some spider or octopus. Like some metastasizing tumor that threatened to overwhelm the town.

Will is a gift from God, desire from the devil.

Sheep only need a single flock, but people need two: one to belong to and make them feel comfortable, and another to blame all of society's problems on.

Never in mankind's history have we so fundamentally changed our means of existence with so little thought.

Love is the enjoyment one experiences by looking at the world through the eyes of another.

Simplistic ideas are the weapons with which the thoughtful are clubbed.

Most animals sleep in a hole in the ground or hanging from a tree. Man alone has made for himself an elaborate resting place. And yet he is the only one to have developed the alarm clock to rouse himself from it, the only species to spend sixteen or more hours of each day away from it.

Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I'd be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube.

Good enough may be an acceptable end, but it should never be an acceptable goal.

Fools are in the majority, and they never lack confidence because a fool believes that being in the majority is proof that one is right.

To be myself, to follow my desires to the best of my abilities. That's the only end worth shooting for. Success and failure lie beyond us, they may be signposts that direct us, but they are foolish goals in themselves. To truly be who I have been made to be, made myself to be, ah, that is the only mission worthy of all the life that flows within.

Sooner or later you realize there are no answers, no answers except the ones you believe. Sooner or later faith is the only answer left.

Every man is ultimately groping in the dark, believing he has some understanding. Perhaps it is better thus. Perhaps we would go mad to realize what a thin skein of atmosphere protects us from the emptiness of outer space, what a thin layer of reason protects us from a reality far beyond our comprehension.

Sometimes you just have to hold on even when you don't believe in what you're holding on to anymore. Sometimes you have to hold on to empty and distant memories, even if it feels like there isn't any 'you' left. I think that's what faith is all about, doing what you need to do even when the feeling isn't there anymore.

The definition of stupid is the inabilitly to see another side to an argument other than one's own.

Such places exist among the endless abodes of every major city, places that seem to be sanctuaries from the present, immune to the hustle and bustle, the sound and fury that in the end change nothing. Like long unopened books sitting upon dusty shelves, there exist people filled with knowledge that has somehow been saved from extinction. But buried as they are by time, there abides in them yet a seed awaiting the proper condition for germination. There is some process that occurs in dormancy, some subtle shifting of the fabric of reality that science has yet to discover. From such forgotten places as these occasionally springs, in some unseen future, a gigantic oak whose day has come.

But failure and success are labels placed upon people's lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.

Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn't say anything bad about it.

There is a third choice besides being busy and killing time, something profound.

I write pre-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, I'm not interested in a future where everything is blown to hell, I'd rather write something that helps to prevent it from happening.

What is wisdom? It is the result of multiple paradigms brought to their intellectual furthest reaches and balanced and merged together. The fundamentalist, the person who only sees life through a single lens, can never hope for wisdom.

Where there is hope there is life.

Facts, like living things, have a value in and of themselves and demand respect. Yet some people use them as means to an end, and dismiss them as soon as they are done using them.

Once you realize that life and love are not things you can possess but forces that emanate through us and through all creation, then you can begin to appreciate the miracle you are a part of. You can release the burden and appreciate what you have had, have now and will have. Only trying to hold on to what you do not have causes pain. Letting go permits you to experience the incredible joy that comes to you at each and every moment.

As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.

Nothing is taken at face value anymore, everything must be dissected. Perhaps it is the rise of advertisement over church and state. Things once spoken were spoken with strength and authority. Now they are spoken with stealth and with guile. They are spoken not to the rational mind but to the sub-conscious, the mind within the mind.

I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.

Ours has been an expansionist society, but that narrative must change as we run out of places to expand into. But our culture is like a cart stuck in the same old rut that has been leading us in one direction. The longer we've been using a path, the deeper the ruts get, the harder it is to escape them. We've been moving ever Westward, but there's only so far we can go in that direction before we fall into the ocean. It's a direction that we cannot continue on forever, but the breaking of those ruts will require a major rupture. The old narrative is dying, and it will be quite a crushing of gears before things are re-adjusted. A shared story is needed for a civilization to endure.

We have created a world we don't like, don't understand and don't trust, and we are too frightened to try to change it.

Perhaps the media may not always be telling what to think, but it is always telling you what to think about.

If God rewards the faithful with earthly rewards, then what leverage does the devil have?

True ideas seem to suffer from repetition, while stupid ones tend to flourish.

To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still.

The media is socially liberal, economically conservative, and always pro-war.

Intelligence is overrated. Two dogs who sniff each others' butts learn more about each other in a moment than many humans understand about those they've known for a lifetime.

Vulgarity is like a fine wine: it should only be uncorked on a special occasion, and then only shared with the right group of people.

Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played.

If patriotism is a scoundrel's last refuge, then the concept of freedom is his first sales pitch.

Stories nowadays are put in to squares, just like everything else. Stories are ever changing. They are like rivers that flow, but mankind is busy trying to dam them up and as a result, they become stagnant. They divert the water into square swimming pools, and then add chemicals to it in order to keep it sterile.

Each man is an island unto himself. But though a sea of difference may divide us, an entire world of commonality lies beneath.

The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.

It is wisdom to know who you are, but not to the point of excluding who you might become.

Here is the paradox of it: the more of an individual you become the more you realize we are interrelated, that success of one requires the success of all.

They are always the problem. There is no evil in this world you cannot blame on them. The world will never be right as long as they exist. Whereas we are right, we are always right. We desire to make the world a better place whereas they either consciously desire to make it worse or else are willing to make it so through wrong ideas. There is only one way to make the world we are trying to create, and that is to get rid of them, get rid of every last one of them. And the only way to do that is to stop creating them. Because there is no "they" until we choose to see someone as such. When we choose to see the humanity in everyone, then there is no more they, there is only us.

The fool attempts to predict the next big wave while ignoring the tide.

When you've known somebody since childhood, you never have to worry about them seeing the child that still exists inside of you. They've already seen it. And since they still know and associate with you, it means they accept that child inside you that is never really going to go away.

Safety and constancy were illusions granted only to those afraid enough not to peer beyond the walls.

Perhaps the one unanswerable question in life is why so many of us choose to live in a fantasy world of our own creation that offers us nothing but pain.

There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past.

Humans recite the words to the play they are in without ever bothering to read the script.

Faith is jumping off a cliff, knowing you're going to have to fly. Once you're falling from a cliff, flapping your arms like a madman isn't really faith, I suppose, it's just the logical consequence of faith. It's where the devil waits to tempt us, it's the forty days and nights spent in the desert. It's that experience we all must have in our time on earth of what life would be without God. We all have to be tested.

A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.

Perhaps religion provides the justification for wars, but science provides the weapons.