T. E. Lawrence Quotes
British - Soldier August 16, 1888 - May 19, 1935

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T. E. Lawrence

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.
T. E. Lawrence

When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
T. E. Lawrence

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.
T. E. Lawrence

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.
T. E. Lawrence

To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
T. E. Lawrence

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
T. E. Lawrence

I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
T. E. Lawrence

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T. E. Lawrence

The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn, for, in everything but wits and knowledge, the Arab is generally the better man of the two.
T. E. Lawrence

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
T. E. Lawrence

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
T. E. Lawrence

To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.
T. E. Lawrence

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.
T. E. Lawrence

Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
T. E. Lawrence

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.
T. E. Lawrence

A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
T. E. Lawrence

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
T. E. Lawrence

The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.
T. E. Lawrence

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
T. E. Lawrence

We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. Lawrence

Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.
T. E. Lawrence

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.
T. E. Lawrence

A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point.
T. E. Lawrence

Georgette Heyer Quotes
British - Novelist August 16, 1902 - July 4, 1974

Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.
Georgette Heyer

She bowed her head, clasping her hands tightly before her upon the arm of his chair, for her heart yearned towards him, yet could not reach him, and it made her throat ache with unhappiness to meet that look of his that rested on her face without seeing it.
Georgette Heyer

I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature, and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
Georgette Heyer

E. F. Schumacher Quotes
English - Economist August 16, 1911 - September 4, 1977

Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
E. F. Schumacher

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacher

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.
E. F. Schumacher

It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.
E. F. Schumacher

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.
E. F. Schumacher

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.
E. F. Schumacher

Charles Bukowski Quotes
American - Author August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
Charles Bukowski

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
Charles Bukowski

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
Charles Bukowski

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
Charles Bukowski

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
Charles Bukowski

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
Charles Bukowski

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
Charles Bukowski

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Charles Bukowski

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
Charles Bukowski

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Charles Bukowski

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
Charles Bukowski

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
Charles Bukowski

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Charles Bukowski

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?
Charles Bukowski

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
Charles Bukowski

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
Charles Bukowski

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
Charles Bukowski

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
Charles Bukowski

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
Charles Bukowski

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
Charles Bukowski

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
Charles Bukowski

I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
Charles Bukowski

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
Charles Bukowski

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
Charles Bukowski

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
Charles Bukowski

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
Charles Bukowski

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
Charles Bukowski

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
Charles Bukowski

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
Charles Bukowski

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Charles Bukowski

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
Charles Bukowski

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
Charles Bukowski

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
Charles Bukowski

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
Charles Bukowski

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
Charles Bukowski

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
Charles Bukowski

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
Charles Bukowski

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
Charles Bukowski

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
Charles Bukowski

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.
Charles Bukowski

I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
Charles Bukowski

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
Charles Bukowski

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.
Charles Bukowski

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
Charles Bukowski

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Charles Bukowski

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
Charles Bukowski

It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
Charles Bukowski

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
Charles Bukowski

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
Charles Bukowski

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Charles Bukowski

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
Charles Bukowski

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
Charles Bukowski

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
Charles Bukowski

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
Charles Bukowski

Never get out of bed before noon.
Charles Bukowski

When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
Charles Bukowski

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
Charles Bukowski

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
Charles Bukowski

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
Charles Bukowski

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
Charles Bukowski

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
Charles Bukowski

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
Charles Bukowski

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.
Charles Bukowski

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
E. F. Schumacher

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
E. F. Schumacher

If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.
E. F. Schumacher

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.
E. F. Schumacher

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.
E. F. Schumacher

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
E. F. Schumacher