Favorite non-movie quotes

[Chaos]

Just like the movie quote thread, only... well... not about movies. Video games, literature, comics, webcomics... anything goes.


"It´ll be a dark day when I give in to a mere superpower!"
- Scrooge McDuck, "The Invader of Fort Duckburgh"

"Three of us, against a whole tribe of natives - we have them grossly outnumbered!"
- Jose Carioca, "The Magnificient Seven (minus 4) Caballeros"


The rumour spread through the city like wildfire, which had spread through the city quite often ever since its inhabitants had learned the meaning of the term ´fire insurance´.
- "The Truth" by Terry Pratchett

"I just wanted to say that, if this doesn´t work out, I´ll have known that there was still some good in you."
"That´s right," Crowley said bitterly, "make my day."
- "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neill Gaiman


Redcloak: "The ogre chieftains are here. They want more gold."
Xykon: "More gold? I´m not paying them anything to begin with."
Redcloak: "That does seem to be the crux of the issue."
- Order of the Stick

Elan: "There´s six of us and six of them. If we team up, the ten of us-"
Haley: "Twelve, sweety."
Elan: "... The twelve of us will have no trouble defeating Xykon."
(...)
Roy: "Elan has a point there... which probably proves that we ended up in some bizarre alternate universe."
- Order of the Stick


Kaidan: "... Big place."
Ashley: "Is that your professional opinion?"

Liara: "Usually I prefer more thorough investigations, and fewer explosions."
Tali: "I´ll say! Half the things I tried to salvage ended up trying to kill me."

Ashley: "And nobody died."
Kaidan: "I could shoot someone if that makes you feel better."
Ashley: "No, I´m good."

Computer: "It seems you are attempting to reactivate this facility. Do you require assistance?"
Shepard: "Damn, a pop-up..."

"I haven´t been shot in the head nearly enough times for this to sound like a good idea."
- Mass Effect

Shepard: "About what your father said... what he did... you deserve better."
Tali: "I got better, Shepard. I got you."

Mordin: "Killed many people, in many ways... guns, drugs, bombs, traps, once with farming equipment - but never with medicine!"

Mordin: "Have been studying Collector virus. Ruled out possibility of intelligent virus. Unless very intelligent... and toying with me."

Joker: "You want me to go crawling through the ducts again..."
EDI: "I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees."

Shepard: "Enjoy it, Joker. If we're stuck here, we might as well enjoy it."
Joker: "Does it breach uniform regs if I get that on a crew shirt? Because this is my favorite ´you have no choice´ choice ever."
Shepard: "Technically this is a civilian ship. I'm probably lucky you're still wearing pants."
- Mass Effect 2

[swampyankee]

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -- Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi. -- Luis W Alvarez

It is not even wrong. -- Wolfgang Pauli

...and my current sig:

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. -- Antoine de St Exupery

[mike alexander]

"What's your name? he asked.
-Theodore Sturgeon, Slow Sculpture


And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.
-Theodore Sturgeon, To Here and the Easel


We choose up sides and kill each other.
-Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles


P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
-Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon


And stasis was punctured and the room was empty.
Isaac Asimov, The Ugly Little Boy


"North," murmurred the Captain, "North."
Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun


They came and took our land away from us they said; but nobody understood.
R.A. Lafferty, Land of the Great Horses


Creation began.
-James Blish, The Triumph of Time


"You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...

"Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars."
— Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination


But for Man, home can never be a single country, a single world, a single Solar System, a single star cluster. While the race endures in recognizably human form, it can have no one abiding place short of the Universe itself. This divine discontent is part of our destiny. It is one more, and perhaps the greatest, of the gifts we inherited from the sea that rolls so restlessly around the world.
It will be driving our descendants on toward myriad unimaginable goals when the sea is stilled forever, and Earth itself a fading legend lost among the stars.
-Arthur Clarke, Report on Planet Three

[Paul Beardsley]

Thank you, Mike, for reminding me (and how!) why I like science fiction.

"But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man."

Closing lines of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

[peteshimmon]

Heck my eyesight must be going, its only a
nickel. I thought it was a dime from the
other side of the valley.
Scrooge McDuck.

Doorbell.
You want me to get that?
Benson.

You got a bunch o'guys about to turn
blue! We're breathing again.
Charles Duke.

[vonmazur]

"Read my lips; NO NEW AXES!" Barbarian in the credit card ad....

Dale

[grapes]

One of the Roosevelt's philosophy of life: Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches.

Mickey Mantle's regret: Had I known I was going to live this long, I would've taken better care of myself.

Unknown aboriginal person: They seem OK to me. Anyway, how much can it hurt?

[jlhredshift]

as reported in Pais during the 1961 Solvay conference:

F:I am Feynman
D:I am Dirac (silence)
F:It must be wonderful to be the discoverer of that equation.
D:That was a long time ago. (pause)
D:What are you working on?
F:Mesons
D:Are you trying to discover an equation for them?
F:It is very hard.
D:One must try.

[mike alexander]

Thought: Show me a star.
-Harlan Ellison, Blind Lightning

"I'm Spud Flynn, and I come of a race o' kings."
-Oliver LaFarge, Spud and Cochise

Joe roared.
-Poul Anderson, Call Me Joe

He would not witness but he would aid in the formation of the planets.
-A.E. van Vogt, The Weapon Shops of Isher

"In this rainy land I have felt the ancient Merican spirit stirring, and the foundations of the world are again atremble."
-Poul Anderson, Orion Shall Rise

No one dared disturb him in his thoughts: and presently he turned his back upon the dwindling Sun.
-Arthur Clarke, Childhood's End

The fog horn blew.
-Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

[peteshimmon]

"Gearge! You gart whad a wand?"

H G Wells, The Invisible Man.


"I'm doctor of cow****, pig****,
and chicken****," he said. "When
you doctors figure out what you
want, you'll find me out in the
barn shovelling my thesis."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Player Piano.

[swampyankee]

"Read my lips; NO NEW AXES!" Barbarian in the credit card ad....

Dale

I do love that one...

[mike alexander]

The sun was hot and I felt like killing something.
-Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[Swift]

"Overhead, and without any fuss, the stars were going out."
— Arthur C. Clarke (The Nine Billion Names of God)

[Eta C]

The sun was hot and I felt like killing something.
-Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A good one, but the opening lines are timeless:

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should drive...' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these #$%&@#$% animals?'"

And of course the quote (taken somewhat out of context) from Samuel Johnson on the dedication page. Johnson originally meant this in a negative way in describing why people were (and are) willing to drink themselves to the point of being "beasts"

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

[Eta C]

And a few from Ambrose Bierce courtesy of the "Devils Dictionary."

Alone, adj. In bad company.

Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last refuge of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I bet to submit that it is the first.

And one could go on and reprint the whole book here. It's that good.

[Solfe]

"I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of." - Walden & On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

"What follows is based on actual occurrences... However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either." Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[swampyankee]

Call me Ishmael...

[jokergirl]

The dedication and first line of Fahrenheit 451:

"If you are given lined paper, write the other way."

and

"It was a pleasure to burn."

[Romanus]

From a webcomic I won't bother naming for good reason:

Pupil: "Master, the champion is an enormous brute! Each arm alone is bigger than me!"
Swordmaster: "Then each arm alone is where you must seek victory."
Pupil: "I...don't understand, master."
Swordmaster: "Fight his arm. Win. Then fight his leg. Fight him piece by piece 'til he's all defeated."
Pupil: "Ah...with all respect, master...that's kinda nuts."
[SLAP!]

"Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe there's only one true god. And he lives in this lake. And his name is Orgo." (whistles away)
--The State

"There's nothing better than a home-cooked Italian meal. But when we have coupons, we go to Olive Garden." -- Mad TV sketch.

"I don't want any Spam!"
"Why can't she have egg, bacon, Spam and sausage?"
"That's got Spam in it!"
"Not as much as Spam, egg, sausage and Spam."
--(Do I even need to source this? Really?)

Okay, for something a little different:

He had already learned that there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.

Ernest Hemingway, "The Last Good Country".

From a book I'm reading now, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We:

It is a little curious to reflect that while each man is a mystery to himself, he is an open book to others; the reason being, perhaps, that he sees in himself the perplexities and torment of the mental processes out of which action issues, and they see in him only the simple and indivisible act itself.

[TJMac]

"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunfighter followed." S. King

[swampyankee]

"Scientists have to be experts in changing their minds." -- a Naugatuck [Connecticut] High School Student in CP Physics

[ngc3314]

A smattering, some vaguely literary:

Standing on a cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of suns, and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds. (Abbe Georges Lemaitre, 1950)

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the hard truths later. (Lewis Thomas, "Ceti" in Lives of a Cell)

A great and rigid authoritarian administration with a thought police which is supposed to know all should at least keep its records straight. (Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo

When you are in an observatory at three o'clock in the morning, stop your photograph. Stop your photometer. Walk away from the telescope. Walk out the front door. Now walk twenty paces - no more, no less. Then stop - and look up at the sky - just to make sure you are making bloody sense. (Bart Bok)

"... it's considered bad luck to lose parts of the spacecraft right before launch." (Valentin Lebedev, Diary of a Cosmonaut)

"Not having a transporter was a significant disadvantage. The method we used to descend from orbit to the surface of an alien world, uhh, worked..." (Neal Armstrong, Sept. 2004)

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final results. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface)

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. http://xkcd.com/552

[Paul Beardsley]

Thanks, ngc3314, that's the best bunch of quotes I've seen gathered in a small space.

[jrkeller]

"No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
- George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ch. 10

Always do everything you ask of those you command.
George S. Patton

[jrkeller]

And we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife - Meatloaf Paradise by the Dashboard Light

[SkepticJ]

"The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it's full of stars!" - 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novel.

[AGN Fuel]

Because it is there. (George Mallory)

What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals - and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, "Hamlet")

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. (Jaques, "As you like it")

We don't get to choose our fathers, but we DO get to choose our father-figures. I chose my mother. That set me back a bit. (Stan Smith - "Joint Custody")

[WHarris]

"The Ramans do everything in threes." -- Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

[peteshimmon]

Yet the future possibilities of such explosives
are appalling, and their effects on future wars
and international affairs are of fundamental
importance.

From the General Summary, Smyth report on
Atomic Energy, 1945.


Indeed genuine efforts were made to shift the
Afghans, but Russian emissaries were driven out
of Aghanistan at pistol point.

The Black cloud, Fred Hoyle.

[mike alexander]

Here is the which of the what-she-did
Hid the Bell with a Blot, she did
But she fell in love with a hominid
So where is the which of the what-she-did?
=Cordwainer Smith, The Balad of Lost C'Mell

We ive in the lovely quiet and the dark.
-John Varley, The Persistence of Vision