MARCUS: You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair; then I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happened to us come because we actually deserved them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 3×13 “A Late Delivery from Avalon” (22 Apr 1996)
 
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IVANOVA: You’re having delusions of grandeur again.
MARCUS: Well, if you’re going to have delusions, you may as well go for the really satisfying ones.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 4×03 “The Summoning” (18 Nov 1996)
 
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LONDO: I suppose there’ll be a war now, hmm? All that running around and shooting at one another. You would have thought sooner or later it’d go out of fashion.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)
 
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LONDO: Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998)
 
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So we’re just in this maze for now, trying to figure out if that glint in the distance is daylight, or a Minotaur with an Uzi.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, “ATTN JMS: Warner Bros” (8 Dec 1996)
    (Source)
 
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It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution spent developing the ability to create language. The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. The less precise the usage, the less clear the process of language, the less you can achieve what you want to achieve when you open you mouth to say something. We have slowly bastardized and degraded and weakened the language, abetted and abided by a growing cultural disdain for literacy, a cyclical trend toward anti-intellectualism.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, “ATTN JMS: Influences?” (27 Oct 1995)
    (Source)
 
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SEBASTIAN: Good luck to you in your “holy cause,” Captain Sheridan. May your choices have better results than mine: remembered not as a messenger, remembered not as a reformer, not as a prophet, not as a hero, not even as Sebastian. Remembered only as “Jack.”

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 2×21 “Comes the Inquisitor” (22 Apr 1995)
 
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SHERIDAN: Oh, now that is a lie!
DELENN: Minbari do not lie.
SHERIDAN: Well then it is slander.
DELENN: To be slander, it must be false. That’s two down.
SHERIDAN: Well then it’s damned inconvenient.
DELENN: The truth always is.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)
 
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And people wonder where I get this weird sense of humor; the universe considers me its personal cat toy. You have ANY idea what it’s like to go through life covered in cosmic cat spit?

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
irc.warnerbros.com #Babylon5 (23 Jan 1997)
    (Source)
 
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SHERIDAN: The universe doesn’t give you any points for doing things that are easy.

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 2×03 “The Geometry of Shadows” (16 Nov 1994)
 
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G’KAR: By G’Quon I can’t recall the last time I was in a fight like that! No moral ambiguity, no hopeless battle against ancient and overwhelming forces. They were the bad guys, as you say, and we were the good guys! And they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor!

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 3×13 “A Late Delivery from Avalon” (22 Apr 1996)
 
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SHERIDAN: I prefer to be only slightly insane.
GARIBALDI: Don’t we all?

Larry Ditillio
Lawrence G. "Larry" DiTillio (1948-2019) American TV and film screenwriter
Babylon 5, “Knives” (17 May 1995)
 
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VIR: I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave, like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?

J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
Babylon 5, 2×16 “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” (10 May 1995)
 
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The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) American author
Little Foxes, ch. 3 (1865)
 
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Fanatics are governed rather by imagination than by judgment.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) American author
(Attributed)

This quote was attributed to "Stowe" in the 1913 ed. of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (itself a reprint of Webster's International Dictionary). It is referenced in quotes as an uncited aphorism in The Unjust Judge (1854).
 
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Treat ’em like dogs and you’ll have dogs’ work and dogs’ actions. Treat ’em like men and you’ll have men’s work.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) American author
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 11 “In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind” (1852)
 
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Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) American author
“The Lady Who Does Her Own Work,” Atlantic Monthly (1864)
 
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A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.

Mildred W. Struven (1892-1983) American Christian Scientist, housewife
(Attributed)

Quoted by her daughter Jean Harris, Stranger in Two Worlds (1986)
 
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What makes a marriage last is for a man and a woman to continue to have things to argue about.

Rex Stout (1886-1975) American writer
(Attributed)
 
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The problem with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off.

Rex Stout (1886-1975) American writer
“The Rodeo Murder” (1960)
 
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I do not insult Marko. I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.

Rex Stout (1886-1975) American writer
The Black Mountain, ch. 2 (1954)
 
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DOTTY: It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Jumpers, Act I (1972)
 
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ROSENCRANTZ: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Act II (1967)
 
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HENRY: Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
The Real Thing, Act II, sc. 5 (1982)
 
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HOPKINS: In all my years, I never seen, heard, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.

Peter Stone (1930-2003) American writer for theater, television, movies
1776, with Sherman Edwards (play, 1969)
 
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ADAMS [praying to God in song]:
A little flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere,
Or a cataclysmic earthquake, I’d accept with some despair.
But no, you send us Congress! Good God, sir, was that fair?

Peter Stone (1930-2003) American writer for theater, television, movies
1776, with Sherman Edwards (play 1969)
 
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ADAMS: This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend SOMEbody!

Peter Stone (1930-2003) American writer for theater, television, movies
1776, with Sherman Edwards (play 1969)
 
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Love is stronger than justice,
Love is thicker than blood,
Love, love, love is stronger than justice,
Love is a big, fat river in flood.

Sting (b. 1951) British singer-songwriter, actor [b. Gordon Matthew Summer]
“Love is Stronger than Justice (The Munificent Seven)”
 
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I had a linguistics professor who said that it’s man’s ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be, but I think there’s one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren’t afraid of vacuum cleaners.

Jeff Stilson (b. c. 1959) American comedian, writer
(Attributed)
 
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Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago, those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression, they put their faith, for better or for worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman’s intrusive thumb or a judge’s heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance. A book worthless to me may convey something of value to my neighbor. In the free society to which our Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself.

Potter Stewart (1915-1985) US Supreme Court Justice (1959-81)
Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463, 498 (1966) [dissenting]
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Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“Old Mortality”

This is the source of the otherwise-spurious Stevenson quote "Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences" or "Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences."

 
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Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, “Yoshida-Torajiro,” (1882)
 
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If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“A Christmas Sermon,” Across the Plains, ch. 12 (1892)
 
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A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“The Merry Men” (1882)

Full text.
 
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There is no duty we so much under-rate as the duty of being happy.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“An Apology for Idlers” (1881)
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To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
An Inland Voyage, ch. 3 “The Royal Sport Nautique” (1878)

Full text.
 
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To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, “Henry David Thoreau” (5) (1882)
    (Source)
 
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You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“The Amateur Immigrant” (1895)
 
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The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
Address to the Samoan Students, Malua (Jan 1890)

Full text.

 
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We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Putting First Things (1960)
 
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There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
(Attributed)
 
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Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
(Attributed)
 
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My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Speech, Detroit (7 Oct 1952)
 
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In America any boy may become President, and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Speech, Indianapolis, Indiana (26 Sep 1952)

Sometimes quoted as: "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."
 
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Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Speech, National Guard Armory, Albuquerque (12 Sep 1952)
 
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It reminds me of the small boy who jumbled his Biblical quotations and said: “A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Speech (1951)

(mingling Proverbs 12:22 and Psalms 46:1)
 
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The rock-bottom foundation of a free press is the integrity of the people who run it.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) American diplomat, statesman
Speech to Journalists, Portland (8 Sep. 1952)
 
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Silent gratitude isn’t very much use to anyone.

G. B. Stern (1890-1973) British writer [Gladys Bronwyn Stern]
(Attributed)
 
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Whether we like it or not, the natural and the human environment are inseparable. It would be a great mistake to try to completely erase human traces from any part of the landscape. We need to protect the natural world, but we also need to protect reminders of the human past so that we can learn from them.

Bonnie Stepenoff (b. 1949) American writer, researcher, historian
“Landscapes Remember”
 
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The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people — and this is true whether or not they are well educated — is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations — in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

Neal Stephenson (b. 1959) American novelist
The Diamond Age (1995)
 
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There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) American electrical engineer
(Attributed)

Quoted in John J. B. Morgan and T. Webb Ewing, Making the Most of Your Life (2005). Sometimes given as: "No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions."
 
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No one wants advice — only corroboration.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer
The Winter of Our Discontent, Part I, ch. 6 (1961)
 
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A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer
The Grapes of Wrath, ch 28 (1939)
 
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The wise person questions the wisdom of others because they question their own; the foolish one, because it is different from their own.

Leo Stein (1872-1947) American art collector, writer
(Attributed)
 
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If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Herb Stein (1916-1999) American economist
Stein’s Law (c. 1980)

This was a frequent statement by Stein. He explained it: "This proposition, arising first in a discussion of the balance-of-payments deficit, is a response to those who think that if something cannot go on forever, steps must be taken to stop it -- even to stop it at once."

Variants.:
- "If something can’t go on forever, it won’t."
- "Anything that can’t go on, won’t."
- "Trends that can't continue won't.

 
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