Stephen Vizinczey quotes

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it. (Stephen Vizinczey)
When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
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? View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
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. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
People flock around the sorcerer, the priest, the scientist, the commissar, the psychiatrist, the drug pusher, each generation of the faithful pitying the victims of past fallacies, and this repetitive vanity keeps us stupider than we need to be. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 106. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
During all my wandering through two decades and two continents, I've found nothing more pathetic than the universal misery of young boys trying to charm young girls. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
Cultural History suggests that men have always had a greater inclination to close their eyes than to open them, to believe comforting lies rather than disconcerting truths. ** The Rules of Chaos (1969), p. 113. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
The world is full of people whom no one has put in chains but who bind themselves with frozen thoughts and fears. A man whose mind conforms to the conditioned responses of his daily life is a coward and a slave. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 84. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
... our confidence in foretelling and influencing events increases in inverse ratio to our ability to do so. The farther we go from ourselves and from the present, the less we sense the probabilities, and it is easy for us to be "dead certain" about things we cannot possibly know anything about.**The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 23,24. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
Far from securing order, terror intensifies disorder and social disintegration. Terror, the most extreme form of power, is the least effective, and rulers employ it to the detriment of their own authority. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 48. (Stephen Vizinczey)
There may not always be a way where there's a will, but on the other hand - if success isn't certain, neither is failure. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p. 87. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey
Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with. View quote
Stephen Vizinczey