[discussing the Doomsday machine] President Merkin Muffley: How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger? Dr. Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That i...
Harold Crick: What do these questions have to do with anything? Professor Jules Hilbert: Nothing. The only way to find out what story you're in is to determine what stories you're not in. Odd as it may seem, I've just ruled out half of Greek literatu...
Lord Blackwood: My powers and my assets were given to me for one purpose. A magnificent, but simple purpose: to create a new future. A future ruled by us. Tomorrow at noon, we take the first step towards a new chapter in our history. Magic will lead ...
[first lines] Teacher: Earth that was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many. We found a new solar system, dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. Each one terraformed, a process taking decades, to support human life, to be new Earths....
Woody: Hey, if any of you get to Sunnyside Daycare, you tell 'em Woody made it home. Dolly: You came from Sunnyside? Trixie: But how'd you escape? Woody: Well, it wasn't easy. I... What do you mean "escape"? Mr. Pricklepants: Sunnyside is a place of ...
Mr. Kroot: All right, all right, Bolander, break that up. You know the rules. You and your girlfriend want to do that, go someplace else, huh? Steve Bolander: Hey, Kroot! Why don't you go kiss a duck? Mr. Kroot: What did you say? Steve Bolander: I sa...
Alfred Pennyworth: When you told me your grand plan for saving Gotham, the only thing that stopped me from calling the men in white coats was when you said that it wasn't about thrill-seeking. Bruce Wayne: It's not. Alfred Pennyworth: What would you ...
Princess Isabelle: I understand you have suffered. I know... about your woman. William Wallace: [pauses] She was my wife. We married in secret because I would not share her with an English lord. They killed her to get to me. I've never spoken of it, ...
One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: ‘Abbe Lot came to Abbe Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and accor...
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with t...
Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discove...
The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I...
He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natu...
My mom's coming home soon," I said. "We should go to your place." Patch ran a hand across the shadow of stubble along his jaw. "I have rules about who I take there." I was getting really tired of that answer. "If you showed me, you'd have to kill me?...
Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has ...
Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by re...
For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Taiping rebels not only consolidated their bases in sou...
In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young—-well, not even the young...
For many reasons, Dear,” Delia said in a soothing voice. “We are tired of running , tired of traveling. It is time for us to be together in a world where your kind of evil does not exist." Lucan growled at her, but she continued, "And I could not...
If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social ar...
It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstance...
