Richard Matheson

I am legend.

Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival.

Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?

I don’t believe in the “supernatural,” I believe in the “supernormal.” To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it’s because we haven’t been able to understand it yet.

This day father hit in the chain again before it had light. I have to try to pull it out again.

Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature.

That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that. And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do that and we’re going to set up society again slowly but surely.

I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another.

The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it.
The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it.

George Bernard Shaw

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God— nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

Noam Chomsky

Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: "What kind of peace?"

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

"Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radicalstatists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.

The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.

The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians (Afghanistan) is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off.

What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored?

What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country. [...] To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.

James Clavell

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one.

All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning.

The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.

The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous.

These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.

To think good thoughts ... requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about.

Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life.

What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at.

Your daddy had to go back to school a little. He had some strangethoughts — and he wanted other grown-ups to believe them. It's not right for others to believe wrongthoughts, is it?

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.

Now the sun touched the horizon and the man reined in his horse tiredly, glad that the time for prayer had come.

Alan Moore

Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel … with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics.

Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns.

The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

Charlotte Bronte

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

I feel that this also is true; but, dear Sir, is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles?

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse.

It is not violence that best overcomes hate — nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

School-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence.

The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.

G. K. Chesterton

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable.

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.

Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

Mary Shelley

We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.

My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene sky amidst these verdant woods: yet I loved all the changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights with them.

I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Live, and be happy, and make others so.

I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

Michael Crichton

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

In the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion. … The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification — framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.

Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time.

Science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid — and merits universal acceptance — only if it can be independently verified.

Things do not turn out the way you think they will.

Endless presentation of conflict may interfere with genuine issue resolution.

We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another

Honoré de Balzac

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Equality may be aright, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate.

The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.