Islands Quotes - Page 16

• Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world.

  Halford Mackinder

  Heart, Europe, East

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• I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

  James A. Michener

  Ocean, Moon, Volcanoes

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• The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

  William Golding

  Flower, Air, White

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• Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

  Lester Bangs

  Real, Past, Rocks

  Lester Bangs (2013). “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll”, p.74, Anchor

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• If we steal a man's purse we are thieves. If we steal twelve hundred islands we are patriots. If you steal a man's money you will be sent to the penitentiary. If you steal his liberty you will be sent to the White House.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Men, White, House

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• Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This
  illustrious savant, after having made several voyages around the
  world, died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages,
  of whom not a single fragment was ever recovered.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Savages, Sandwiches, World

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.64, University of Georgia Press

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• If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that — in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

  Steven Weinberg

  Art, Stars, Drama

  "The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words". Book edited by Nancy K. Frankenberry, 2008.

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• The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Stephen Leacock

  Reading, Writing, Encyclopedia Britannica

  Stephen Leacock (2014). “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town”, p.7, The Floating Press

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• The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world are prepared for life by exclusion from it.

  Maria Montessori

  Cutting, People, World

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• We Poor Cousins don’t care at all though, except for when we’re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy cool high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition or purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.

  Miriam Toews

  Girl, Cousin, Children

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• Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

  Curzio Malaparte

  Men, Rocks, Sea

  Curzio Malaparte (2007). “Woman Like Me”, p.7, Troubador Publishing Ltd

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• When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.

  Andrew Roberts

  War, Israel, Years

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• If you're shipwrecked on an island with 10 million dollars and your wife has gold and diamonds, but there's no water, no arable land, no fish, you have nothing.  Money is a 'nothing' thing.

  Jacque Fresco

  Water, Wife, Gold

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• There is no such thing as beauty. If your culture says, 'This is a beautiful girl,' that's within the framework of your culture. If you're brought up in an island where people have pointed heads, that would be 'beautiful' in your terms. All these mythological structures is what gets us into trouble; the artificiality of our values that get us into trouble.

  Jacque Fresco

  Beautiful, Girl, People

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• Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci—a paragon of charisma and corruption.

  Philip Gourevitch

  Rhode Island, Political, Criminals

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• Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

  Lawrence Block

  War, Book, Small Numbers

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• Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

  Bartolome de las Casas

  Two, Population, Three

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• What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.

  Walker Percy

  Morning, Simple, Missing

  "The Moviegoer: A Novel".

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• For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Reading, Kids, Technology

  "How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi" by Paolo Bacigalupi, www.wired.com. June 20, 2012.

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• There used to be this guy called Vinny who worked on the floor of the stock exchange, said one big investor who had observed the market for a long time. After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir

  Michael Lewis

  Weekend, Long, Worry

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• Well managed and healthy oceans are vital to the survival of small island states, such as the Maldives. This important book shows how scientists and governments can better protect the world's oceans.

  Mohamed Nasheed

  Ocean, Book, Government

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• Never had there been such an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge…. But the obverse is also true. We can have thrust upon us a false picture of reality as distorting as the trick mirrors in a Coney Island funhouse.

  Howard E. Koch

  Opportunity, Reality, Mirrors

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• A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

  John Millington Synge

  Journey, Hiking, Rocks

  John Millington Synge (2008). “The Aran Islands and Connemara”, p.39, Mercier Press Ltd

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• Woods and forests have been essentialt to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Country, Memories, Unique

  Robert Macfarlane (2008). “The Wild Places”, p.69, Penguin

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• I advise everyone to find an island in this life. Find a place where this culture can't take energy away from you, sap your will and originality. Since anything physical can be mental, that island can be your home. Turn off the electromagnetic waves being forced upon you, the countless invisible forces coming at you all the time.

  RZA

  Inspirational, Life, Home

  The RZA (2009). “The Tao of Wu”, p.21, Penguin

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