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John Barnes
54 quotes
“The more rules you impose on a creative intelligence, of course, the fewer problems it can solve.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mother had been talking in that bizarre way a lot lately; it sounded like the Olsen novels, “back when men were full of manliness, fields were full of soybeans, small towns were full of hicks, and life was full of deeply significant aching empty meaningless existential nothingness,” as Tom liked to put it.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You thought you could treat me the way you did everybody else and beat me up for being smarter than you. Because you’ve always been the big king of the class, haven’t you, Your Majesty? Well, you’re not anymore. You were never anything but the plain old class bully, and now you’re the ex-bully. And the only reason people are bullies is because they’re stupid.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Papa always says there’s room for everyone, but some people certainly take theirs up without making it interesting.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wasn’t as dumb as I thought, I realized—just not interested in the same things I was.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing about yourself is addictive. I hope all you kids noticed that. If you feel like autobiography, try heroin. Lots safer and easier to control…”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally I asked, “Um, Tom—are the uh, Alien Artifacts really art, or did you just say that to hassle Mother?” “They have to be art. Remember the First Law of Anthropology: if they’re doing something you don’t understand, it’s either an isolated lunatic, a religious ritual, or art.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Brains don’t exactly run in that family—they sort of dribble slowly away.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t really win an argument against somebody’s feeling that something is just plain wrong.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I burst into tears. It’s the best defense ever found against well-meaning people who are telling you something stupid “for your own good.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never get into arguments between people of opposite gender,” he said. “Part of why I’m still healthy and vigorous at my age.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When all else fails, admit you’re an idiot.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They won’t much care about how well it works, just about how right it is…they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s usually just ambition that puts them into it—and like any group of people selected for ambition and nothing else, they turn out to be a pretty bad lot. Like mandarins in China, colonial administrators in the British Empire, lawyers in old North America, or the reconstruction agencies after the Slaughter—individually there are decent people who do some good, but as a class they’re amoral, vicious leeches with a good cover story.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way you can tell there’s democracy going on is that nothing gets done.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How he must have been astonished to see people behaving decently when what they believed was absolute anathema to him.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s just no fight left in her; that’s what happens when you really believe in something, and find out that it was never true.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Justice has a way of not arriving where and when you wish it.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a long interval, Margaret said, “Sorry. Effects of upbringing.” “We none of us escape them,” I said.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s stunned numb when she takes his hand and says, “Let’s give it a try. I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t bend enough or try to see anyone else’s point of view.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Work does not cause money; getting paid causes money.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophic clarity has been a key to his life in business, and he doesn’t fall for facile or self-flattering descriptions—not even, usually, for the self-flattery of thinking he is immune to self-flattery.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t get mad, and don’t waste time getting even. Get ahead.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yeats fussed about things falling apart and the center not being able to hold. What really happened was that the center ceased to exist altogether.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people think the world is out to get them, because they have all the evidence they need—they don’t get enough of what they want. But that doesn’t make it so.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a game against the clock, but what isn’t?”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is characteristic of information that it can be stolen an all but unlimited number of times.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a long step down the road to paranoia, but it’s been a proverb for a hundred years that being paranoid does not mean that they aren’t out to get you.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Too bad about all those people, but as Hassan says, compassion speaks well of its holder but does little for its recipient.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experimentally she thinks about dumping toxic waste in pristine wilderness and killing the last great apes on earth with a club. She still finds both those thoughts disgusting. This is a relief; it seems to her that she’s just selfish, not evil. She was always taught they’re the same thing. She hopes she remembers, when she gets out of all this, that they’re not.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once I’m dead, I can afford to be patient.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once you understand what money can do it gets harder to live without it.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are you up to faking being sincere underneath faking being fake?”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wonders if there is some requirement that you have to be an idiot to be a politician.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s always known the real way to money is not through production but through control; “The hotel owner gets rich owning the keys, the maids stay poor keeping the toilets clean,” as one of his biz profs back at Madison used to say.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The beautiful earth is being crapped up by an excess of people—lovely as individuals, towns, and cultures, but hideous in such profusion.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With diligent effort he has established that there is no statistical basis for Murphy’s Law. He has also established that he believes in it anyway.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally she resorts to the oldest tactic of all, telling the truth.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a good idea for diplomats to keep their word in small matters. It makes the later complete betrayals more of a surprise.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Almost every culture in the Thousand Cultures had some wisdom literature, and much of it was the same between any two cultures. . . . Cultures tend to be alike in much of what they think are the basic virtues, but one of the ones they are most alike in, though it rarely appears in their book of wisdom, is: Distrust strangers, fear foreigners, dread novelty.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And just like this, all of a sudden, your people and mine will begin to talk?" "It only looks sudden from some places. Running off a cliff is sudden if you don't know it's there, even if you have been running toward it for days." "That's not a reassuring metaphor." "It isn't meant to be.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shan had always said that in any multiple choice about human motivation, the real answer was always "all of the above.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In discussing the existence, or not, of the soul: "I am Caledon. Quite a few of my fellow Caledons still believe there is some essence to a human being, something that makes a person unique." "And you don't." "I don't. I see that people who believe in anything beyond plain physical reality are mainly engaged in making themselves or others miserable.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a saying among those of us who have careers with the Council of Humanity that skiers, cooks, painters, and diplomats must work with what is in front of them.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings always say they prefer peace, but it takes a saint to talk us into not assaulting our neighbors.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Other people say that their parents are the same way whenever there’s bad news from whatever patch of dirt they came from, but being common still doesn’t mean it makes any sense. After all, it was twenty years ago, and if the adults were going to get so upset about having everything smashed up, they shouldn’t have had a war or tolerated AIDS for so long that they gave it the chance to turn into mutAIDS, or allowed the climate disequilibration to get so far out of hand. Honestly, they remind me of the three-year-olds in the nursery, smashing things to bits and then crying because they’re broken. I certainly hope I’m not that kind of a moron when I’m that old.”
John Barnes (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source