Edmund Burke Quotes

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.

If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated.

I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

I think that science fiction has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

Lawyers are fleas on the hide of human nature.

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.

The purists are small in number but, you know hardy of voice.

Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.

Negativity takes no imagination. It's far easier to criticize someone's decisions after they make them than to propose better ones beforehand.

Even the European critics... They said Hostel is the smartest film they'd seen on capitalism and how it's gone too far.

But it is not at all certain that this superiority of the many over the sound few is possible in the case of every people and every large number. There are some whom it would be impossible: otherwise the theory would apply to wild animals- and yet some men are hardly any better than wild animals.

When I was your age, television was called books.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."

Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.