Quotes displayed on GeorgeFlanagin.com

Saul Alinsky	I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That means working within the system. There is no other place to start from except political lunacy.
Jeffrey Archer	Birth is life's first lottery ticket.
Emperor Leto Atreides II	The past is no farther away than your pillow.
Lera Auerbach	If there is consensual love, there must be consensual art, but great art is never consensual – it rips you apart, uses you for its creation, and then leaves you like an empty useless shell. You may resent it, but you can't help loving it all the same.
Patricia Barber	On the dark side of passion comes a taste for revenge.
Julian Barnes	I think when we are young, we invent futures for ourselves. When we are older, we invent pasts for others.
Paul Beatty	They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
Russell Bernabo	I saw the best lines of my generation destoyed by a flock of seagulls.
Leonard Bernstein	It's easy to shake the blame for any crime By trotting out that mea culpa pantomime: "Yes, yes, I'm bad. I've sinned. I'm sad". Then go out and do it one more time.
Charles M. Blow	The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite. -- From 28 July 2019 column in NY Times.
John Boener	Drinking wine is a marathon, not a sprint.
Paul Bowles	Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.
Douglas Broome	I'm not as good as I should be, but I'm better than I want to be. -- said about a tedious and error prone task.
Vincent Bugliosi	When you have a large group of people devoting their lives to looking at every word, every comma, they can create a lot of mischief.
Boris Bukh	Some ancient people wasted time on research in number theory, some of which ended up being practically useful. Some studied motion of stars in detail far exceeding calendaring and navigational needs. This also proved useful. Many, many studies also led to dead-ends. At the time, one could not tell which of them would.
George Gordon Byron	My slumbers -- if I slumber -- are not sleep, but a continuance of enduring thought, which then I can resist not. In my heart there is a vigil, and these eyes but close to look within.
Stephen L. Carter	As there are precious moments between two people that can never be retrieved, there are also moments of tension that can never be avoided, no matter how they try.
Stephen Colbert	We don't need any help looking hypocritical, okay? We're the country that invented both chili cheese fries and open-heart surgery.
Saint John Will I Am Coltrane	(about Miles Davis) He is completely unpredictable: sometimes he would just walk off stage after just playing a few notes, not even completing one chorus.
Christopher Cook	Tristan und Isolde was never intended to be a romantic love story. This is not the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, nor even Guinevere's adulterous love for Lancelot. After Tristan und Isolde there is nothing.
Sir Alistair Cooke	In the life of an overnight sensation, a year is an æon.
Georges-Jacques Danton	I am not so much an atheist as an adult.
Miles Davis	(about Saint John Coltrane) He's so tied up in his music that even his friends don't understand what he's trying to do.
Richard Dawkins	Wishful thinking counts, because human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
Richard Dawkins	Bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance, there is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding.
Colin Dexter	Actually is a ridiculous word, isn't it? It's a weasel word -- it means nothing whatsoever. It's a space filler. Whether I actually saw her, I don't know. What I do know is that I saw her.
Stephen R. Donaldson	What good are friends if they know you too well to believe your lies?
Sophie Egan	We don't eat fats or cholesterol or antioxidants -- we eat food.
Shūsaku Endō	I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea is the silence of God... the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish, God remains with folded arms, silent.
Richard Flanagan	Virtue is just vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.
George Flanagin	Any ordering system is partly a hashing algorithm: for example, only alphabetization puts me between Richard Flanagan and Karen Joy Fowler.
Karen Joy Fowler	An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
Tana French	I crave the truth, and I lie.
Norman Goldman	If you are unwilling to vote for the lesser of two evils, then you are voting for the greater of the two evils.
Paul Graham	I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant	I miss doing nothing the most of all.
Thomas Hardy, OM	Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.
Toby Hendy	People think there is a lot of effort involved in having long hair, but really it is one of the laziest things you can do. You literally just do nothing, and don’t cut it.
Henricus Rex VIII	Most humility is pretense.
Frank Herbert	He who wishes to repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
Rogers Hornsby	People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball: Well, I stare out the window and wait for spring.
Michel Houellebecq	If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.
Max Howell	But well, what the fuck does comp-sci have to do with modern app development? [after failing to be hired at Google, following the comp-sci interview]
Greg Iles	People need a mystery onto which they can project all their free floating paranoia.
John Irving	Being afraid you will look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
David Janszen	Some people only have one joke, so they molest it into the ground.
Lady P. D. James	(on the danger of too much conversation) Words crowd out thought.
Sophie Monks Kaufman	Melancholia is a film that, like many of Von Trier's works, offers a provocation: the depressed outlook, it dares to suggest, is the correct one. The world is ending. Resistance is futile. All you can do is accept this state of catastrophe and relax into the beauty of this final spectacle.
Stephen King	The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey.
Stephen King	He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was Plague Grows Worse. Washington Mute. From The Stand, 1978
Donald Knuth	A trick is a clever idea that can be used once, while a technique is a trick that can be used at least twice.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja	My dreams opened up into the limitlessness of fantasy.
Cathy Ladman	All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, but with different holidays.
Scott E. Lewis	If you get all the multiple layers of things that are supposed to improve productivity out of the way, most [programming] tasks take very little time.
Thomas Mann	There is nothing actual about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly, then it’s short. But how long or short it is in actuality, no one knows.
Dame Hilary Mantel	It is the absence of facts that frightens people; the gap you open into which they pour their fears, fantasies and desires.
Dame Hilary Mantel	It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal.
Mao Tse-Tung	The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue.
Brian McGreevy	There are dreams so real that you can still feel them when you wake up. ... But then, there's the smell of coffee.
John McWhorter, V	Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives.
David Mitchell	Love is pure joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan shark prices.
Prof. Melissa O'Neill	From a very practical perspective, the longer the code, the more likely it is to contain an implementation error.
Muad'Dib	The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
Dorothy Parker	Eternity is the length of time it takes two people to eat a ham.
Lee Parker	Life is a pissing match; that's why drinking is so important.
Brandon Pike	When in doubt, people follow traditional paths. That way, if they lose, at least they have an alibi.
Marcel Proust	It is a charming law of nature that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.
Joshua Redman	Improvisation is a team sport. Excellence can be infectious. Greatness, sometimes even temporarily transferable. Spontaneity abhors a vacuum. Invention is seldom remote.
Philip Rieff	We are, I fear, getting to know one another. Reticence, secrecy, concealment of self have been transformed into social problems; once they were aspects of civility.
Maximillien de Robespierre	When will the people be educated? When they have enough to eat, and when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous tongues and pens to deceive them; when their interests are identified with those of the people. When will this be? Never. (trans: Thomas Carlyle)
Carlos Ruiz-Zafón	Se conoce que, en las fases más avanzadas del cretinismo, la falta de ideas se compensa con el exceso de ideologías. (It is known that in the most advanced stages of cretinism, the lack of ideas is made up for by an excess of ideologies.)
Bertrand Russell, OM	Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end.
Grant Sanderson	There is no cold hard rigorous proof that it's hard to compute [a hash function] in the reverse direction. And yet, a huge amount of modern security depends on cryptographic hash functions and the idea that they have this property [hard to compute in reverse].
Leif Segerstam	Don't be afraid to increase the dose of porridge of music, there is no danger from overeating.
Frank Sinatra	I feel sorry for people who don't drink; when they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they are going to feel all day.
Dame Edith Sitwell	Hell is just as properly proper as Greenwich, or as Bath, or Joppa.
Anthony Soprano	I didn't make the rules; the rules have always been there.
Kaikhosru Sorabji	... likewise, to the everlasting glory of those few Men blessed and sanctified in the curses and execrations of those many whose praise is eternal damnation.
Eliot Spitzer	The 'revolving door' is a better metaphor than [it is] a diagnosis.
Jake Swearingen	Youtube is the largest clearinghouse of human stupidity the world has ever known.
Taylor Swift	I don't start shit, but I can tell you how it ends.
Donald J. Trump	He put out a statement, that was essentially a project really, more or less of an option, that we were looking at in Moscow, and everybody knew about it. I didn't do the project. I decided not to do the project. So I didn't do it. So we're not talking about doing a project, we're talking about not doing a project. We were thinking about building a building. We had an option, I don't know what you would call it. We decided, I decided, ultimately not to do it. There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. If I did do it, there would have been nothing wrong. That was a project that we didn't do, that was a project that wasn't done for a lot of reasons. This was a deal that didn't happen. That was no deal. I mean, if you look, this was an option, I guess. I don't know. I want to be very specific. So but to my way of thinking, it was an option that I decided not to do. We had a position to possibly do a deal, to build a building of some kind in Moscow. I decided not to do it. --(transcribed from audio) 29 November 2018 Demonstrating palilalia.
Lars von Trier	Thoughts distort reality, not the other way around.
James Wan	Google's corporate motto may be "Don't Be Evil," but its bottom line is still "Make A Profit."
Oscar Wilde	What is truth? In matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Ron Kipling Williams	Profanity is what you see everyday. Words don’t do it justice.
Peter Wilson	Reports may or may not include an abstract, but if so it will often be called a 'Summary'. There may be an even shorter abstract as well, often called an 'Executive Summary', for those who feel that details are irrelevant.

George Flanagin

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