Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.
The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 “Year Zero,” the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money — only work and death.
John Pilger, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979).
Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.
My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues. This may be because vice needs solidarity among those who yield to it in order to be tolerated at all, whereas virtue is its own reward, as the proverb says, and is happily very often its own protection — far more often than not, in our day.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 40.
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.
President Stephen Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message (December 1886).
We all know how bad we are; but it needs much encouragement to persuade some of us to believe that we can really be any better.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 77.
With most men who have moulded, hacked, and chiselled the world into history, to think has been to act.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893), p. 93.
You know, every election cycle we talk about ‘this is the most election of our lifetime’ — Lawrence, this one is.
Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, talking to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday’s Last Word.
Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.
Theodore Parker, A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842).