Rick Riordan Quotes

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

It was beautiful in a harsh I'm-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way.

Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.

I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick.

I went to see that movie 'From Hell,' or as Osama bin Laden calls it - 'Roots.'

I ain't the type for begging, I am not the type to plead. If she don't change those evil ways, I'm gonna make her bleed.

I've heard what people are saying, and it's a very weird thing. They're going into a realm where it's somethign that's almost ugly, rather than something that can be so beautiful.

To justify God's ways to man.

Everything beautiful has to be worked for.

Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?

Men feared witches and burned women.

The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

Africa is trying to find its way back to a sense of itself, when much of that was lost through colonization.

My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot survivor of that time, that place.

The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.

To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful.

We need not fear the judgement of history. Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?

Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world called beautiful. Through its silver veil the evil and ungentle passions looked out, hideous and hateful.

There is a loving way with words and an unloving way. And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.

I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway.