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Quotes / Good Is Boring

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Anime

"Hope is harmony. A just heart, moving toward the light. That is all. Despair is hope's polar opposite. It is messy and confusing. It swallows up love, hatred, and everything else. Because not knowing where you will end up is despair. Despair is even what you cannot predict. Only despair's unpredictability can save you from a boring future."
Junko Enoshima, Danganronpa 3 Side: Despair

Fan Works

"I guess I got a little of what Lex was infected with, genetically. Not any of the science stuff, but— You know how straights are, and how straight life is. Soooo boring. I found out about guys, cycles, drugs, and privilege in short order. Got off drugs. Got myself a real cycle gang while I was in college, Nasty's Nasties. Dad ‘n' Mom didn't approve, but I didn't give a damn as long as they kept the money coming. Then they cut it off."
Nasthalthia Luthor, Kara of Rokyn

"Oh yes, the great 'Collective Harmony'," sneered the Tyrant. "A vast consciousness, billions of minds living and working in a concord of love and perfection. No indecisions, no doubts, no excitement, no...evil. The security and strength of a unified dullness. How boring."
"You are small," Anna replied, looking down in contempt at the short queen. "You are a primitive neurotic and think in small ways. You lack harmony, order, greatness. You do not understand what it is to be Bored!"

Film—Live-Action

Corie: You’re always dressed right. You always look right. You always say the right thing. You’re very nearly perfect!
Paul: That’s a rotten thing to say.

"Adventure. Hah! Excitement. Hah! A Jedi craves not these things."

Live-Action TV

"Must you always be so ethical?"
Q to Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Qpid")

"The thing about Heaven, is that Heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven, like singing. Talking to God. Watering pot plants."
Archbishop Edmund Blackadder, The Blackadder

Literature

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Music

Prim and proper, the girl who's never been cased
I'm tired of being pure and not chased
Like something that seeks its level
I want to go to the devil
Eartha Kitt, "I Want to be Evil"

They say there's a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it's better but I say it ain't
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
The sinners are much more fun
You know that only the good die young
Billy Joel, "Only The Good Die Young"

Stand-up Comedy

"People say to me, 'Oh, Bill, leave them alone. They're so good, and so clean-cut, and they're such a good image for the children.' FUCK THAT. When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children listening to people who fucking ROCKED! I don't care if they died in POOLS OF THEIR OWN VOMIT! I want someone who plays from his FUCKIN' HEART!

'Mommy, the man Bill told me to listen to has a blood bubble on his nose—' SHADDAP AND LISTEN TO HIM PLAY.
Bill Hicks on boy bands, Salvation

Video Games

"Such wisdom, such intellect. But, oh, what a bore the fellow was."
The Master on the First Doctor, Destiny of the Doctors

Webcomics

"Once upon a time, an infinite number of people lived perfect, eternal lives. The end."
Zadok, 1/0

"Functional adults are boring anyway."

Web Original

I love the founder of Deadspin, Will Leitch. He's a good friend and usually a reasonable human being. But every fucking October, he morphs into an eight-year-old wearing a propeller beanie and shooting marbles on the living room floor. GOLLY GEE GUYS ISN'T CARDINALS BASEBALL JUST THE BESTEST?! And the worst part is that, whenever you tell Leitch to GO TO HELL', he acts like you're the asshole!
Drew Magary, Deadspin

I can watch Cyclops objectively make the right choice, and fight for his woman, and help the school, and stand up as a reliable pillar of virtue and good intentions, but that doesn't matter, because Wolverine smokes, and smoking is cool.
Daniel O'Brien, Cracked

Wolverine wouldn’t be Wolverine if he didn’t have Cyclops to rebel against. I’d just rather read about the rebelling than the guy who tells him hey stop that, it’s after 10 and we have a noise policy here.

It's suddenly flipped to where the major engine of interest and excitement in the show is the villain, while the Doctor is, absent the villain, kind of a pompous bore.

The problem is that Bashir is hard to get to work on his own for more than a scene. After all, The Next Generation had a great deal of trouble with character-based storytelling for its first two years, and I suspect the fact that so many of the characters were bland idealised paragons contributed to that.

Paris was once a traitorous rogue and Neelix a shrewd businessman…and the episode seems to go out of its way to point out how they have lost their touch and becomes such chumps. Yes that’s right, it’s a Mary Sue moment where the writers are actually admitting they have fudged these characters right up and revealed how the Federation turns you into lazy, boring ciphers. Well at least they admit it.
Joe Ford on Star Trek: Voyager, "Live Fast and Prosper"

Archer isn’t Captain Kirk. He likes water polo. He spends his off-duty hours hugging a Beagle. He’s more comfortable talking about warp theory than negotiating with hostile aliens or making sweet love to green women.

Chris: The producers of this show seem to really like going to the “Clark Goes Evil” well.
David: And the sad thing is, it’s when Welling does his best work.
Chris: Yeah, it really makes me wonder if Welling’s almost-nonexistant acting as Clark is actually some kind of a weird choice to represent the fact that Clark Kent is a guy who’s holding back all the time. Like, he’s going for “repressed” and we just end up interpreting it as "mobile cardboard".
ComicsAlliance, on Smallville ("Transference")

Web Video

We've got a ship that can blow up shit
But we're peaceful, that's kind of lame
Doug Walker, Star Trek: The Next Generation With Lyrics

"Well, reformation is just a fancy way of saying, 'We're going to make you into a boring character.'"
Twilight Sparkle, Ultra Fast Pony ("Discord and Me")

Real Life

You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?

Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.[...] Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
George Orwell, review of Mein Kampf

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.

"Bland works."
—Ontario Premier Bill Davis

"The truth of the matter is, when I first got the script, I said, 'Maniac's the most fun part'...Once again, I'm the 'serious' guy, the man on a mission; an agenda that doesn't allow for humor, really."
Mark Hamill on playing Blair in Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom

"The captain doesn’t do nearly enough screwing and shooting on this show."
Patrick Stewart to Ronald D. Moore, scriptwriter for Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Heroes are not acting parts because they're predictable. That's the wonderful and challenging thing about playing a hero: Within predictability, how can you be surprising and amusing?"

"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
Simone Weil, discussing how this trope is Zig-Zagged between fiction and real life

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