Margaret Atwood Quotes

People just make stupid mistakes. And they keep making them and keep making them, and suddenly they can't dig themselves out.

Like I tell people they wind up having short term pleasure and long term pain. I'm a tell what Minister Louis Farrakhan said, "Black people ain't poor, they just don't spend wisely" and that's the truth.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

I guess if you keep making the same mistake long enough, it becomes your style.

The Indian who fells the tree that he may gather the fruit, and the Arab who plunders the caravans of commerce are actuated by the same impulse of savage nature, and relinquish for momentary rapine the long and secure possession of the most important blessings.

You are human, you will make mistakes, and it's one of the most beautiful things about being human, but you must learn from your mistakes, otherwise your life will have a lot of unnecessary pain.

... the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.

Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood.

Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes.

George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: “Yes, this will do”. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving… me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha… Sad, sad, sad.

There are some poisons which, before they kill men, allay pain and diffuse a soothing sensation through the frame. We may recognize the hour of enjoyment they procure, but we must not separate it from the price at which it was purchased.

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

There are so many kinds of awful men One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.

It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.

All that we did was human, stupid, easily forgiven, Not quite right.

There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.

We are our own wicked gods with little 'g's' and big dicks, sadistic and constantly inflicting a slow demise.

One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

One trouble with trouble is that it usually starts out like fun.

We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.