Russell Hoban Quotes

Serious numbers will speak to us always.

The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

It's fine if you want a system that shows a boa constrictor to better advantage than a man.

This is what analysts have calculated. It's a number that's out there and we're not arguing with it.

Number, the most excellent of all inventions.

Whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage.

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.

The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part,and some of his limbs gibbeted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town.

It may be laid down as a general rule, that no woman who hath any great pretensions to admiration is ever well pleased in a company where she perceives herself to fill only the second place.

Every fault of the mind becomes more conspicuous and more guilty in proportion to the rank of the offender

A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse

tis hard to live in a world where all look upon you as below them.

I wouldn't place much stock in numbers. I don't believe that they reflect Putin's true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today's Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.

Oh, figures!' answered Ned. 'You can make figures do whatever you want.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.

Reactionary: One who wants the rules enforced so nobody can take his pile away from him the way he got it from others.

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

We value some lives more than others.

It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.