Was That An Insult?

The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it;
if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it;
if you can’t top it, laugh at it;
if you can’t laugh at it, it’s probably deserved

-    J Russel Lynes

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

-    Groucho Marx

I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion.

-    Robert L Stevenson

He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

-    Raymond Chandler

He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.

-    Arthur Miller

I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions

-    Mark Twain

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

-    Jonathan Swift

He would stab his best friend to write an epigram on his tombstone.

-    Oscar Wilde

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire

-    Winston Churchill

He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

-    Ayn Rand

He had a winning smile, everything else was a loser.

-    George C Scott

The tautness of is face sours ripe grapes.

-    William Shakespeare

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

-    George Bernard Shaw

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong.

- Benjamin Disraeli

The Tao of Physics, India, LHC

"Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter."

- Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics.

To celebrate India's connection to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Experiment, India's Department of Atomic Energy gifted a two-metre bronze statue of Nataraja (Dancing Shiva ) to CERN on June 18, 2004 with a plaque that had the above lines of Fritjof Capra engraved on it.

quote Horror

"Sometimes we all go mad"
- Norman Bates

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"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"
"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..."

- Ghost Story

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"You may go wherever you wish in the castle except where the doors are locked, where of course, you will not wish to go."

- Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker

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"Truly effective horror cuts you in half, to use a nice dismemberment metaphor, and then pulls you apart. Ambivalence is at the heart of horror - things that are gruesome can also be strangely compelling. half of you wants to look, or to know, and the other half doesn't. One response is about pleasure and the other about pain, and it is the business of horror to put the two in touch with each other."

- Clive Barker, A-Z of Horror

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"Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the wester. It is not a kind of fiction...Horror is an emotion"

- Douglas Winter in his introduction to Prime Evil

opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The paragraph is believed to the the single greatest opening paragraph in horror fiction.

Quotes by Mark Twain

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.


All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.


When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.


There are many excuses for our sins, but the most popular is providence.


I never let my schooling interfere with my education.


Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.


Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.


There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.


Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.


Training is everything. the peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.

James Ahmed, Guerrillas, Naipaul

“When everybody wants to fight
there’s nothing to fight for.
Everybody wants to fight his own little war,
Everybody is a guerrilla.”

- James Ahmed, the protagonist of V.S. Naipaul's Novel, Guerrillas

Orwellian Quotes

According to George Orwell:


All people are equal but some people are more equal than others.


The best way to end a war is to lose it.


Political language - and this is true with variations of all political parties - is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.


As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.


Poverty frees eccentrics from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.