Stephen Vizinczey Quotations

Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

There are millions of people who think that having heard about something is the same as knowing it, and their notion of culture is a mixture of elegant lifestyle and big names.

When too many things are taken for granted, it isnext to impossible to perceive the truth.

Like all wage-slaves,he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with.

Modesty is an excuse for sloppiness, laziness, self-indulgence; small ambitions evoke small efforts

One must start early to become a great man.

People will either like you for your money or they'll resent you for having it.. So you're stuck with a small group who are as rich as you are, and that doesn't give you much choice.

We live under the tyranny of various professional groups, and all the 'influence' we could bring to bear on the running of schools, trains or power stations isn't sufficient to move a feather.

To be jealous of a woman one doesn't love is the most ridiculous form of vanity, but Hardwick, surrounded by people whose livelihood depended on him, had no idea that he could be ridiculous.

With professionals she was professional: she concentrated on looking unimpressed.

Women cannot always flow, and even when they do, they well up slowly, while men are quick as torrents - they are primed by nature to burst forth at different times... the twenty-minute gap, the abyss between the sexes.

Another person's ego is the most exquisite of delicacies, king's caviar - those who taste it can never resist it.

Oh God,' he groaned. 'I'd almost forgotten! What a relief it was when I stopped worrying about being good!

A man's virtues, it seems to me, are his abilities, and his vices are his deficiencies.

I submit that anyone who is trying to explain one thing in terms of something else has nothing important to say.

The good conscience of the wicked rest on all the villainies they refrain form committing.

The dream of a crook is a man with a dream.

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.

Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn’t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

Whenever you hear the word "inevitable", watch out! An enemy of humanity has identified himself.

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture-aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.

Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.

Consistency is a virtue for trains.

To state a lie firmly, categorically and with great authority, undeterred by the fact that all concerned know it to be a lie, is one of the principal activities defined by the term practising law.

To be great is to assume great concerns.

Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth

As a rule, the most dangerous ideas are not the ones that divide people but those on which they agree.

All great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible.

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with