If a Book Doesn’t Make You Think, What Good is it?

Controversial quotes from controversial books. Why would some see them disappear? Because they encourage people to think and question. They seek to remind people to not to blindly follow those who self-appointed greatness. And they tell us to pay attention who is behind the curtain.

All Quiet On The Western Front on cautioning us on what reasons we use to go to war:

At the next war let all the Kaisers, presidents and generals and diplomats go into a big field and fight it out first among themselves. That will satisfy us and keep us at home.

You still think it’s beautiful to die for your country. The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for country, it’s better not to die at all.

1984 on blindly giving away power and letting them win:

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Fahrenheit 451 on being engaged in the world and freedom of access to knowledge:

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man.

Atlas Shrugged on finding your Role in the Story of this life:

Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Fighting Slave of Gor (Book 14 of the Counter Earth Saga) on people allowing others define who they are and how to think:

Earthings…are manipulated organisms, helpless in the flow of social forces, slobbering to slogans and rhetoric. They will be the first to celebrate their own downfall. They will not discover what has been done to them until it is too late.

“A sexist is a sexist,” she said. “That is the logical truth,” I said. “An apple is an apple. This argument is not much advanced…[it] is a ‘signal word,’ a word selected for its emotive connotation, not its cognitive meaning. It is to be used as a slander tool to discourage questioning and discourage questioning and enforce verbal agreement…One of the great utilities of these words, long since evacuated of most of their cognitive content, is that they make thought unnecessary…”