Real Dystopia Quotes

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide ~ Geoffrey Hosking

My tears had unexpectedly become real. ~ S.L. Wallace

The good stupid is the brave kind. When there's a real reason behind. Bad stupid is everything else. ~ Brandon Mull

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them. ~ Elizabeth Moon

I've never been that person to fake it, and say what everyone else wants you to say. Then you never have anything personal. If I wanted to be an actress all the time, I could do that. But I don't. I want to be real. I want to be a real person. That's what an artist is. An artist has to be honest. Without honesty, there's nothing. ~ Miley Cyrus

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time. ~ Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

The Bully has a Jekyll and Hyde nature - is vile, vicious and vindictive in private, but innocent and charming in front of witnesses; no-one can (or wants to) believe this individual has a vindictive nature - only the current target of the serial bully's aggression sees both sides; whilst the Jekyll side is described as "charming" and convincing enough to deceive personnel, management and a tribunal, the Hyde side is frequently described as "evil"; Hyde is the real person, Jekyll is an act. ~ Tim Field

In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world. ~ Hyman Rickover

Troy: Why do we inflict this on ourselves?
Ben: Why? I'll tell you why, 'cause the Red Sox never let you down.
Troy: Huh?
Ben: That's right. I mean - why? Because they haven't won a World Series in a century or so? So what? They're here. Every April, they're here. At 1:05 or at 7:05, there is a game. And if it gets rained out, guess what? They make it up to you. Does anyone else in your life do that? The Red Sox don't get divorced. This is a real family. This is the family that's here for you. ~ Jimmy Fallon

'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases. ~ Michael Mann

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? ~ Bill Shapiro

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever. ~ Cesare Pavese

Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Are you real?" I whisper
"Do I feel real?" he whispers back ~ A.G. Howard

Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.

This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development. ~ R.G. Collingwood

When managers explain what their plan is without giving the reasons for it, people wonder what the "real" agenda is. There may be no hidden agenda, but you've succeeded in implying that there is one. Discussing the thought processes behind solutions aims the focus on the solutions, not on second-guessing. When we are honest, people know it. ~ Ed Catmull

He family motto, after all, is 'To Have and To Hold'. We were always a warrior breed, but we don't fight solely for lands and material wealth. There's an understanding, drummed into all of us from our earliest years, that success-true success-means capturing and holding , something more. That something more is the future-to excel is very well, but one needs to excel and survive. To seize lands is well and good, but we want to hold them for all time. Which means creating and building a family-defending the family that is, and creating the next generation. Because it's the next generation that's our future. Without securing that future, material success is no real success at all. ~ Stephanie Laurens

The cigar made its traverse from one side of Harry King to the other. He was known to dote on his daughters, who he felt had rather suffered from having a father who needed to take two baths just to get dirty. ~ Terry Pratchett

All the great people say it was their destiny to be great. Know thyself-you have a destiny to be great. It's coded in your DNA/RNA. Meet thy greater self. Express thy higher self. Fulfill your real self. ~ Mark Victor Hansen

He taught me to understand that the thing about love - real , over the top, makes you feel crazy, overpowering, strips you bare kind of love - is that when you're soaring, you're higher than you dreamed possible. But when you fall, you land inside the deepest darkest crevices, and are left alone to pull yourself out. ~ Claire Contreras

War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet. ~ Darren Shan

It is always a starkly private moment when a governor first apprehends his subject as a man - perhaps not as an equal, but at least as a being, irreducible, possessed of frailties, enthusiasms, a real past, and an uncertain future. ~ Eleanor Catton

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn't all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn't have been the real thing. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colours and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?

Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colours. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the colour of my life is grey. ~ Chris Cleave

As always throughout history, she thought, there are no real victors in conquests; they are merely the planners for more conflict in the future. The ~ Barbara H. Martin

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. ~ Alvin Toffler

Here's the bottom line: I can't play someone if I can't figure out what he cares about. Everybody cares about something, even a rough character. It defines where we step in life. As soon as you find out what somebody cares about, then it all gets real. ~ William Fichtner

Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world. ~ Clifford A. Pickover

The Dip is the long stretch between beginner's luck and real accomplishment. The Dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out. ~ Seth Godin

What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17) ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Enzo looks up at me. Suddenly, the blackness in his eyes seems to fade, replaced by the familiar warm brown of his irises, the red slashes, the glow of life. I see a hint of his old self there, fighting through the darkness of the Underworld to gaze at me one last time. It is the look he'd given me when we used to dance.
This is the real Enzo.
"Let me go," he whispers. It is his voice. It is the voice that once comforted me, gave me strength. And as I try to take in his words, the final tendrils of the tether linking us unravel from around my heart, freeing me. ~ Marie Lu

... All will be
forgotten, everything you perceived, thought,
dreamed, hoped, remembered ... all the past
all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding
nose-picking and deathward attempts
to make real some desperate desire, like
standing upright for a minute in the sun. The
sun that will die. ~ Franz Wright

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is. ~ Jincy Willett

My father started his own business, and before that was a freelance lecturer, and my friends are artists and musicians; they don't have real jobs - none of us have real jobs. ~ Rupert Friend

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way. ~ Paul Feig

My intention always has been to arrive at human contact without enforcing authority. A musician, after all, is not a mili- tary officer. What matters most is human contact. The great mys- tery of music making requires real friendship among those who work together. Every member of the orchestra knows I am with him and her in my heart. ~ Carlo Maria Giulini

A real man isn't one who never makes mistakes. A real man faces his mistakes and fixes them as best he can. ~ Brenda Hodnett

I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die. ~ Jacques Derrida

Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way? ~ Philip K. Dick