E. P. Thompson Quotes

I damn well intend to keep on living the way I think I should.

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything.

Good people drink good beer.

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.

Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday.

There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

We can't care for something we don't understand. This is the purpose of why we explore and why we voyage.

Sometimes you have to, as I say, build bridges where you can - but draw lines where you must.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.

In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.

There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear, a disastrous circle.

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

But you must be patient and careful; nor should you expect to become an accomplished archer without long and severe training.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

[Chicago]: This vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, mace-smelling boneyard of a city: an elegant rockpile of a monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.

Don't judge your taco by its price

To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity.

Maybe I don't take myself so seriously any more. And I don't care how I'm judged. I'm past all that.

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

When husbands and fathers leave, their wives and daughters tend to value themselves less as a result.

You can't imagine what satisfaction can be gotten from throwing a pie into someone's face.

Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

The only limitations are mental. The guy who thinks positively will win.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

During an election, it's like they're doing my job: they're going around banging the drum for their party and selling their movie. You know, it's the same thing.

During job interviews, when they ask: 'What is your worst quality?', I always say: 'Flatulence'. That way I get my own office.

The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.

When in doubt, use brute force.

I'm competitive - that's what defines me - and I love it.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen.

Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG!

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

The perfection of mathematical beauty is such...that whatsoever is most beautiful and regular is also found to be most useful and excellent.

I will fight for your right to be weird- just as I know you will fight for mine.

Hate smolders and eventually destroys, not the hated but the hater.

The behavior of the crowd at Churchill Downs is like 100,000 vicious Hyenas going berserk all at once in a space about the size of a 777 jet or the White House lawn.

I knew a Buddhist once, and I've hated myself ever since.

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.