Patrick Ness Quotes

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

The aspiration to save the world is a morbid phenomenon of today's youth.

The world can be a lot bet­ter than we set­tle for. All you have to do is ask.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is, and if the book has any kind of message, I suppose that's it.

All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.

There is the world that should be and the world that is. We live in one and must create the other.

You are a Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo, and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.

Nothing's gonna change the world, nothing's gonna change the world. There was Lennon and a happy gun, there were words on the pavement.

I think being able to identify with young people and...their capacity to change the world and shake things up. I think that's the greatest strength.

When you really look back and take the wider perspective, it makes total sense that if the status quo is to remain the way it is, women will not be lauded and applauded for bonding with and helping each other, because it would destroy the world order if women organized; it would topple the whole thing. And so, it makes perfect sense to me that the current order of things would encourage the cat fights and encourage the comparisons and encourage the girl-on-girl hate that you see just being promoted everywhere.

Dear young people, do not give up your dreams of a more just world!

When I wrote 'My Humps,' I said, 'This is the stupidest thing ever,' but in a good way. I always wondered what it must be like to be a girl, always gettin' pulled on. Maybe she's the smartest genius on the planet, but she's rackin' double Ds with a 26-inch waist and a big ol' ass and no one's ever gonna see her like that because that's the way the world is today.

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

The media can be an instrument of change. It can maintain the status quo and reflect the views of the society or it can, hopefully, awaken people and change minds. I think it depends on who’s piloting the plane.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist.

Dreams are like commercials, but her dreams are picture perfect.

To take the world as one finds it

I do not like the world as it is; so I am trying to make it a little more as I want it.

I think universal harmony is a pipedream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodeling.

While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.