Sideshows Quotes

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. ~ Ralph Ellison

So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus. ~ Woodrow Wilson

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event? ~ Haruki Murakami

But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They're sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one's persecutors. I don't suppose that forgiveness was uppermost in the minds of people who were being nailed to a cross until Jesus, if not the first man with a Christ complex still the most successful, wafted onto the scene. Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows
a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. ~ Sean Wilsey

It's getting hard to keep up with all of the news from Washington - witch hunts, conspiracy theories and Republicans tearing each other apart over who is ideologically pure and who is apostate. It's a real set of carnival sideshows. ~ Andrew Rosenthal

The general public thinks all little people are in circuses or sideshows. We have doctors, nurses, just about every field covered. ~ Billy Barty

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham. ~ Paul Di Filippo

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me. ~ Ralph Ellison

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room. ~ Ray Bradbury

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence. ~ Ray Kurzweil

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared. ~ Leslie Parry

Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation. ~ Chris Abani

Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear. ~ Robert Ardrey

Most of you will probably never really discover anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don't exploit that to crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how "standards are falling". So don't mull. Just know when you've to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That's all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind. ~ Manu Joseph