What's a quote that has stuck with you for your whole life?
I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too
Edit: Usually these kind of posts only used to have excerpts from books or ancient proverbs, but now I am seeing a lot more quotes from shows/movies/games are also resonating with people. It’s pretty cool to see.
“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.” by Terence McKenna
And the other is from an old salty chief when I was in the navy. This is paraphrasing but:
“Every fuck up comes down to a combination of three root causes: didn’t know, didn’t care, or a material problem”
Someone gets hurt on the job? Well, did they not know they were doing something wrong? Did they not care enough about safety? Or was it simply because something broke? Maybe they didn’t know AND they didn’t care to find out.
It’s a quote for a horrible 90s indie film that’s always struck with me for some reason. My social group and I have since taken this quote as an absolute/truism that gets referenced whenever a situation calls for absolute certainty. Because as we all know, there’s no room on Mars for limp dicks.
The Serenity Prayer - “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
I don’t consider myself very religious, but this has always stuck with me.
In 2004, I was working on the bridge of a ship that was going to be inspected in a few days. There was a small hole in a wall about the size of an electrical outlet with exposed wiring that I wanted to hide from the inspectors. I printed out a picture of a kitten and taped it over the hole. I visited the ship again in 2018, and the kitten was still there.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert, Dune
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
FYI formatting those quotes as code makes them really hard to read, at least for me–the lines don’t break, so I have to scroll the text to the right to get it to be visible. You’d probably be better off with a blockquote,
which would look more like this. That’s done with a > at the start of the line
I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:
“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”
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