Jonathan Spence Quotes

All boxers are liars. Con men. The better the liar, the better the fighter. That's because if you knew what was in a fighter's heart, if you knew what he was really thinking, he'd be easier to find. And if you could find him, he'd be easier to hit. And if you could hit him, you might expose him. And that might expose every person they never stood up to and every person they never stood up for. A single blow can unveil the watermark of your soul in a way nothing else ever can. ~ Brin-Jonathan Butler

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life. ~ Jonathan Swift

Lovable work is visible work. The question of who gets a public platform as a worker and who does not is neatly side-stepped by Jobs's narrative. What do those in the invisible workforce call themselves in their social media profiles? What kinds of identities are available to them? These questions are critical because, as Jonathan Crary notes in his recent book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, while the notion of identity is bound up with public visibility, today that public exposure has become detached from communal forms that once provided safekeeping and care. Crary notes that in the always-on, 24/7 temporality in which we now live, the pressure to be constantly consuming or producing necessitates a constant presence in the public sphere, specifically in the marketplace. ~ Miya Tokumitsu

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for. ~ Jonathan Ive

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels. ~ Jonathan Swift

One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their impact upon social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids would get the education in their early years that would have made them look like college prospects by their secondary years. First we circumscribe their destinies and then we look at the diminished product and we say, "Let's be pragmatic and do with them what we can. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Nothing is insignificant in the history of a young community, and - above all - nothing seems impossible. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I never took the fame too seriously. It was a great period in my life, but it doesn't define me. When I think back on the time, I look at it with a wink. I focus on the good moments I had, not that I was on a lot of magazine covers. ~ Jonathan Taylor Thomas

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. ~ Jonathan Raban

The best thing about Art is that the people who create it live forever. ~ Jonathan Heatt

The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: "Are we there yet?" Adults: "How did we get here so quickly?" Somehow, ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There's no shortage of material in life. ~ Jonathan Ames

Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it. ~ Jonathan Edwards

Revenge is an infection of the spirit. ~ Jonathan Maberry

Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world. ~ Jonathan Swift

I turned and held the blade above us all as an ineffective shield.
The bloodstain on the ceiling now spread almost wall to wall; in our corner, a single triangle of clean space remained. Elsewhere torrents of blood fell in curtains, roaring, driving, gusting like rain waves in a thunderstorm. The floor was awash. It pooled between the floorboards and lashed up against the wainscoting. The chandelier dripped with it: the crystals shone red. Now I knew why the chamber was without furniture of any kind, why it had been deserted for so many years. Now I knew why it had the name it did. ~ Jonathan Stroud

That's stupid."
"That's people. ~ Jonathan Maberry

After the break up of the municipality and the loss of his income my father lost health and spirits. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way. ~ Jonathan Alter

Ooh, I smell something burning... Wait, wait - it's your pants ! Your pants are on fire, you massive liar ! You so weren't on a case ! ~ Jonathan Stroud

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. ~ Jonathan Swift

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day. ~ Jonathan Dimbleby

Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy's house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded - after all, the cop was protecting us. ~ Gerry Spence

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. ~ Jonathan Swift

There is no distance so minute and yet so great as the distance between God and man. (The Lonesome God) ~ Jonathan R. Walton

He looked like a kid caught making an angel in the snow, except his glasses had been blown off and one of his hands was bleeding. He breathed heavily; his belly rose and fell.
I knelt close. 'George?'
A groan, a cough. 'It's too late. Leave me ... Let me sleep ... '
I shook him firmly, slapped the side of his face. 'George, you've got to wake up! George, *please.* Are you okay?'
An eye opened. 'Ow. That cheek was the one part of me that *wasn't* sore.'
'Here, look - your glasses.' I scooped them out of the ash, put them on his chest. ~ Jonathan Stroud

I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You'd be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy - 50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn't matter whether I know how to use these things - I can just walk into a store and buy them. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters. ~ Jonathan Swift

That ghost of a smile fell away and receded and finally faded. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Too many cases thrown out of court, too much pop-psycho crap, satanic bullshit ... if you FEEL you've been abused, you HAVE been! ~ Jonathan Kellerman

They exchanged notes, like children. My grandfather made his out of newspaper clippings and dropped them in her woven baskets, into which he knew only she would dare stick a hand. Meet me under the wooden bridge and I will show you things you have never, ever seen. The "M" was taken from the army that would take his mother's life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the "eet" from their approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH AT LESACS; the "me" from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND CRIMEA; the "und" from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the "er" from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE ... and so on, and so on, each note a collage of love that could never be, and a war that could ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed. ~ Jonathan Sacks

We do, and there is a law in the United States - the Torture Convention - that prohibits the United States from deporting an individual to a country where there is a reasonable expectation that he will be subjected to torture - physical, mental or otherwise. ~ Jonathan Shapiro

Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I'm stepping over it. ~ Jonathan Bowden

Roll the Dice and Watch Them Come Up Snake Eyes Eve ~ Jackson Spence

Compared to relationships, events and programs make me think of ice skates gliding across ice. Relationships make me think of gum on the bottom of a shoe on a hot day. ~ Jonathan Leeman

The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Rather than offering a strict moral code to live by, popular culture today provides more of a moral posture. ~ Jonathan D. Fitzgerald