No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment — just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! — an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire.
- Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.
Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.
And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.
- Father Arnall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million, they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
- Marvin, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
To hell with them! Why should we worry about them? We’ve got to run the world for the sake of the little people. It’s intelligence that’s caused all the troubles of humanity. Man’s mind is the root of all evil. This is the day of the heart. It’s the weak, the meek, the sick and the humble that must be the only objects of our concern.
Those who’re big are here to serve those who aren’t. If they refuse to do their moral duty, we’ve got to force them. There once was an Age of Reason, but we’ve progressed beyond it. This is the Age of Love.
- Eugene Lawson, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
- Philip K. Dick
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that is much harder?
- Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
A true friend stabs you in the front.
- Oscar Wilde
“Think as I think,” said a man,
“Or you are abominably wicked;
You are a toad.”And after I had thought of it,
I said, “I will, then, be a toad.”
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the same men who think — for the same reason — that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choices or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you — just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.
- Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light –“Let me into the darkness again.”
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
- Isaac Asimov
There was one I met upon the road
Who looked at me with kind eyes.
Her said, “Show me of your wares.”
And this I did,
Holding forth one.
He said, “It is a sin.”
Then held I forth another;
He said, “It is a sin.”
Then held I forth another;
He said, “It is a sin.”
And so to the end;
Always he said, “It is a sin.”
And, finally, I cried out,
“But I have none other.”
Then did he look at me
With kinder eyes.
“Poor soul!” he said.
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find - nothing.
- Aesop, The Goose with the Golden Eggs
I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, “Comrade! Brother!”
- Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
You are currently browsing the quotes.dehumanizer.com weblog archives for the Novelists category.
Bad Behavior has blocked 40 access attempts in the last 7 days.
RSS feed