A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

Vladimir Nabokov

Quote Topics

Betrayal Cannot Dues Find Fraternity Genius Get Heaviest Humanity Mental Most Reason Rituals Simply Sleep Torture Used World

Quote Author

Vladimir Nabokov
American - Novelist
April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977

Sleep is a most useful and most salutary operation of nature. Scarcely any minor annoyance angers me more than the being suddenly awakened out of a pleasant slumber. I understand that in Italy they torture poor people by depriving them of sleep. `Tis a torture that cannot long be endured.

Martin Luther

Until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.

Rachel Carson

The genius of Freemasonry is not our Masonic buildings and temples or the trappings of our organizations. It is not our great charities or community activities. It is not our beautiful rituals or their teachings! It is the 'practice of Freemasonry' by the Freemasons. Yet we cannot practice that which we do not know or understand. Thus Masonic education is the foundation for our Fraternity. Brother Carl H. Claudy in The Master's Book says, '.. one thing and only one thing a Masonic Lodge can give its members which they can get nowhere else in the world. That one thing is Masonry.

Carl H. Claudy

There's no reason the nation of Africa cannot and should not join the ranks of the world's most prosperous nations in the near term, in the decades ahead. There is simply no reason.

Joe Biden

I try not to have too many rituals because I believe that rituals don't help you win. I used to do rituals a lot and it was crazy.

Serena Williams

Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.

John McCain

No matter how bad you make the torture scenes, the reality was much worse. Because you cannot put on screen 70 days and nights with no sleep. And this is the easiest part of the torture.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

They call it torture when our guys put underwear on a guy's head, stripped him naked, put an egg between his buttcheeks and made him do jumping jacks. You know, if it can't get you into a fraternity at Chico State University, it's not torture.

Christopher Titus

I find the ones that have the most emotional weight, the heaviest songs. For some reason, for me, they're usually the ones I write the quickest. I put more work into uplifting material, I think, sometimes.

Jason Isbell

Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange

In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.

Kent Nerburn

I don't sleep much. I think it's hereditary. My mom doesn't sleep. My dad never slept. My naps are definitely when I get the most sleep. I'm a big napper - that's when I get most of my sleep.

Lou Williams

The best minds come from the most unexpected faces and places. There is no image for intelligence or genius. Genius is something that cannot be seen. It cannot be produced or manufactured. It is something that even the true genius thinks is unattainable. The genius recognizes he’s just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms. Knowledge is as infinite as the universe. The man who claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing.

Suzy Kassem

I was a sportscaster right out of school. I used to do the nightly newscast and the nightly sportscast and I would write, produce, do live shots. Yeah, I loved it. That's how I cut my teeth in the business.

Chris Harrison

But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?