Quotes About Impact

If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.

philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization....but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

If all I'm remembered for is being a good basketball player, then I've done a bad job with the rest of my life.

I want a film which really hurts your eyes.

The mirror had broken into millions of pieces and the wind blew them all over the world. If a person got a speck in their eye, the person would only see the ugly side of things from then on, but if a piece got in their blood and it reached their heart, it would freeze into a solid block of ice and they couldn't feel anything anymore

I heard you laughing,' Jack said. He wanted to say something about the quality of that terrible laughter, but he did not know how to begin. So he said, ' I've never heard anyone laugh like you do.

Fools blow air out of their mouths as often as their bums, and either way it causes a stink and comes to nothing.

Speak less and say more

No," Merret said, casting me a serious considering look. "no, it is never you alone, yet think how often you have been the pebble that begins the avalanche.

Had not the jutting bones of the world survived a thousand aeons of human life? Could anything I or any human do really matter in the face of that? [Chapter 35, page 510]

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.

Forse non farò cose importanti, ma la storia è fatta di piccoli gesti anonimi, forse domani morirò, [...] ma tutte le cose che farò prima di morire e la mia morte stessa saranno pezzetti di storia, e tutti i pensieri che sto facendo adesso influiscono sulla mia storia di domani, sulla storia di domani del genere umano.

The past casts a tricky shadow

IN THE BOOK OF LIFE we are chapters in one another's stories

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

Rather than asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs.

Même si on découvrait une source d'énergie propre et abondante, la consommation massive d'énergie aurait toujours sur le corps social le même effet que l'intoxication par une drogue physiquement inoffensive, mais psychiquement asservissante.