Obscure Quotes - Page 23

• Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not... Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it... Because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.

  Tom Clancy

  Dream, Real, Responsibility

  "Writers". Book by A. Deutsch, 1995.

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• And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Clouds, Light

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private : Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State”, p.218

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• We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

  Murray Rothbard

  Suicide, Government, People

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• The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Reality, Uprising, Dynamics

  "The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental". Book by Rebecca Wanzo, 2009.

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• I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, World, Safe

  Interview with Benjamin Cohen, www.believermag.com. September 2009.

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• If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Life Is, Poet, Unfinished

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1968). “Pale fire”, Berkley

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• Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.

  Warren Buffett

  Law, Bulls, Bears

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• It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  True Friend, Sacrifice, Rights

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• For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Humility, Political

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• There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

  Victor Hugo

  Hero, Eye, Feet

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1987). “Les misérables”, Dutton Adult

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• Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

  Victor Hugo

  Eye, Men, Sea

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Queens, Latin, Color

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• I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Strong, Wall

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• God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, ie., everybody, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

  Terry Pratchett

  Moving, Dark, Player

  "Good Omens". Book by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, 1990.

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• Distance... is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Distance, Soul, Mind

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2017). “The Sorrows of Young Werther (English German Edition, illustrated): Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Englisch Deutsch Ausgabe illustriert)”, p.51, Clap Publishing, LLC.

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• I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.

  Walt Disney

  Laughter, People, Design

  "The man behind 'The Magic Kingdom'". "The Gazette" Newspaper, May 7, 2005.

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• No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

  Thomas Szasz

  Nature, Names, Purpose

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.137, Routledge

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• All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

  Paul Cezanne

  Art, Men, Wish

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• One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and the unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, White, Black

  Howard Zinn (2015). “A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present”, p.632, Routledge

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• We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Lying, Writing

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• He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

  George Orwell

  Lonely, Long, Broken

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.129, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When God wanted to defeat sin, His ultimate weapon was the sacrifice of His own Son. On Christmas Day two thousand years ago, the birth of a tiny baby in an obscure village in the Middle East was God's supreme triumph of good over evil.

  Charles Colson

  Baby, Son, Sacrifice

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• People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.

  Leonard Cohen

  Writing, People, Used

  "Telling It on the Mountain : Although Leonard Cohen has retreated to a Zen center to write music and poetry, a tribute album being released this week could bring new fans". Interview with Robert Hilburn, articles.latimes.com. September 24, 1995.

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• We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

  Carl Sagan

  Rocks, Humanity, World

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• A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

  Wendell Willkie

  Science, Years, Analysis

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