Stephen Vizinczey Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Stephen Vizinczey
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.

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

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?

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.

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

Stephen Vizinczey
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

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

Stephen Vizinczey
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

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

Stephen Vizinczey
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.

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

Stephen Vizinczey