Leviathan Quotes

“I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“Oh, this beast? It's...perspicacious loris. 'Perspicacious' meaning 'wise or canny'."
"Get stuffed," Bovril said, then giggled.
"And it insults people," Telsa said. "How peculiar.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“Even bloody and bruised, he had an odd sort of swagger, as if he crash-landed in giant air ships every day.”
― Scott Westerfeld

“You young things are too easily persuaded by the touch of lips.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“You'd think that in a fight, NOT MOVING would be a bad habit!”
― Scott Westerfeld

“No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“You're a bum-rag covered in clart!”
― Scott Westerfeld, Deryn Sharp

“As one does a bear riding a bicycle. One sees it so rarely.
(Spoken by Volger, on Deryn)”
― Scott Westerfeld

“Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.
The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.”
Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.”
― Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature

“Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense...”
― Hobbes

“The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The Conscience is a thousand witnesses.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“There's no such thing as a universal morality. There's just your moral code and mine. The most righteous act, in my belief, would be to make you suffer like my mother did”
― Ana Lal Din, The Descent of the Drowned

“Removing his cloak to cover her, Leviathan leaned down, brushing his lips against her cold brow. "Inna lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon," he said under his breath. "Go with the angels, love.”
― Ana Lal Din, The Descent of the Drowned

“The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“Nature indeed plants the seeds of religion--fear and ignorance; kingcraft and priestcraft water and tend it.”
― W.G. Pogson Smith, Leviathan

“Mammon ni mungu wa pesa wa kuzimu anayesimamia mambo yote ya kifedha ulimwenguni. Ni miongoni mwa mashetani saba waliotupwa na Mwenyezi Mungu hapa duniani kutokea mbinguni akiwemo Ibilisi, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Amon na Belphegor. Ibilisi ni mungu wa kiburi, Beelzebub ni mungu wa uroho, Asmodeus ni mungu wa zinaa, Leviathan ni mungu wa wivu, Amon ni mungu wa hasira na Belphegor ni mungu wa uvivu. Jukumu la mashetani hawa ni kusimamia kwa uaminifu mkubwa kutokea kuzimu dhambi kubwa saba duniani ambazo ni kiburi, uroho, zinaa, wivu, hasira, uvivu na uchoyo. Dawa ya dhambi hizo ni busara, kiasi, ujasiri, imani, haki, tumaini na upendo.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Wachawi wanamwabudu Shetani. Lakini Shetani wanayemwabudu si Shetani Ibilisi aliyeumbwa na Mwenyezi Mungu kuja kuudanganya ulimwengu wote. Ni Shetani roho ya mabadiliko, mabadiliko ya kweli, ya ufahamu kamilia ulimwengu huu ambamo sisi sote tunaishi. Wachawi, kwa maneno mengine, wanaabudu miungu – kama vile Inanna wa Mesopotamia, Isis wa Misri, Asherah wa Kaanani au Belus wa Assyria ambaye ndiye mungu wa kwanza kuabuadiwa kama sanamu duniani – iliyotwaliwa na Shetani tangu misingi ya ulimwengu huu kusimikwa. Dhambi aliyotenda Shetani mbinguni ni ndogo kuliko dhambi wanazotenda wachawi duniani, ijapokuwa dhambi aliyotenda Shetani haitaweza kusamehewa na ndiyo maana Shetani hataweza kuwasamehe wanadamu. Ni jukumu letu kuwaita wachawi wote kutoka Babeli na kuwaleta katika ukweli kama kweli wanayemwabudu ni Shetani Ibilisi, Shetani Beelzebub, Shetani Asmodeus, Shetani Leviathan, Shetani Mammon, Shetani Amon au Shetani Belphegor ambao ni mabingwa wa kiburi, uroho, zinaa, wivu, fedha, hasira na uvivu duniani. Wachawi hawajui, na usipojua waweza kufa bila kujua.”
― Enock Maregesi

“As men require a heaping dose of dreams to reconcile themselves to waking life, so too does the hulking Leviathan of society require its dreams—which are films.”
― Michael Shindler

“The identity of Shaitan of the Islamic tradition is crucial. By the time Muhammad (Peace be upon him) was reciting the Qur'an, they were calling Shaitan 'the Old Serpent (Dragon)' and 'Lord of the Abyss.' The Old Serpent or Old Dragon is, according to experts such as E.A. Budge and S.N. Kramer, Leviathan. Leviathan is Lotan. Lotan traces to Tietan. Tietan, the authorities on Near Eastern mythology tell us, is a later form of Tiamat. According to the experts, the Dragon of the Abyss called Shaitan is the same Dragon of the Abyss named Tiamat. Scholars specializing in Near Eastern mythology have stated this repeatedly.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“The identity of Shaitan of the Islamic tradition is crucial. By the time Muhammad (Peace be upon him) was reciting the Qur'an, they were calling Shaitan 'the Old Serpent (Dragon)' and 'Lord of the Abyss.' The Old Serpent or Old Dragon is, according to experts such as E.A. Budge and S.N. Kramer, Leviathan. Leviathan is Lotan. Lotan traces to Tietan. Tietan, the authorities in Near Eastern mythology tell us, is a later form of Tiamat. According to the experts, the Dragon of the Abyss called Shaitan is the same Dragon of the Abyss named Tiamat. Scholars specializing in Near Eastern mythology have stated this repeatedly.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“It’s an obscenity, the final degradation, that you have been infested by the spoor of such fragile parasites.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Chill

“In the battle against the heartless monstrous beasts, the mighty warrior first rips off his face to become a daunting faceless demon.
He murders his soul to become a soulless leviathan; he wanders the world as an omnipresent ghost, haunting the wrongdoers, even in their dreams, rendering them sleepless and paralysed in bed, killing them ever so slowly from within even before they are truly killed.”
― Udayakumar D.S., FT Legacy 1: Who is Frank Twine?

“Safety is relative,” the pale man said.
“You can hide in the mouth of Leviathan if it is sleeping, and its presence will discourage sharks from continuing their pursuit.”
― Johnny Compton, Devils Kill Devils