Top 240 Phrase Quotes

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

There’s the phrase of ‘making America great again,’ but how did we make America great? Who did it? It was Thurgood Marshall who did it. It was Thurgood Marshall who made America live up to its constitution, to its dream. He pushed the envelope to make sure that we were equal.

I do believe that a poet would possess a stronger intuitive sense of phrasing with a rock song. There is a way to tap into the emotions of an audience simply by the cross of a certain phrase, even a single word, against a certain chord.

In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase ‘hope and change,’ to wit: ‘big, fat government.’

I was a contestant on ‘The Apprentice: Martha Stewart’ and more than her telling me I learned from her that authenticity is key. She had a huge issue with a contestant using the phrase ‘fake it ’til you make it’ and fired her that same episode. She taught me that you can’t fake being a master of your craft.

The phrase ‘working mum‘ makes me nervous.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

When I’m writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself – meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don’t wait, or it’s gone.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and ’80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.

I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.

‘Carpe Diem’ is a phrase that I try to embrace. It means seize the day, to make the most of the present and to give little thought to the past or future. In the time that I have here, I want to love and live life to the fullest while being a positive influence on others. And I want a full life for everyone.

I’ve been on TV a long time, and I’ve never had a catch phrase.

As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don’t necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.

One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is ‘Out of the Box.’ The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn’t.

Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else‘s expense.

Colleges have to be about discovering what we don’t yet know and that process will come to a screeching halt if we are leveling threats of bias over the way people phrase things.

Grief is like wandering through a minefield, as my mother puts it: however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere. A song played in a supermarket; an overheard phrase; someone in the distance who your mind cruelly suggests is your loved one for a fleeting moment.

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn’t worried that I wasn’t improvising.

It’s hard because the phrase ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’ is thrown around a lot, but that’s like shorthand. It’s deeper than that. There’s so much more to it.

The phrase ‘dream career’ sounds pretty stupid.

It’s not that Millennials don’t believe some things are serious. We’ll make ‘It Gets Better’ videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is – holy war.

Although at the time I didn’t realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, ‘If it’s all right with you.’ If I thought I’d done anything to make someone unhappy, I’d agonize.

I use a few phrases to let people know a little bit about who I am. One of them is I belong to Jesus, which is a phrase I always wear on a shirt during the most important moments of my professional career.

Remember the phrase – ‘Act your age, not your shoe size?’ That didn’t apply to me, as they were the same until the age of 12 when my feet stopped growing.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

I think the phrase that resonates from ‘Just One Year’ is something I sort of live by: ‘The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.’

The great Muhammad Ali used to have that phrase where he would say: ‘Rumble young man, rumble’ and ‘I’m so pretty I’m ready to rumble.’ I kind of just fine tuned it to ‘Let’s get ready to rumble.’

You can’t write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.

In this age of social media, it is easy to punch out a phrase ‘thoughts are with the family‘ when something bad occurs, and at times, it is insincere.

The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in ‘straw-man device, technique or issue,’ was popularized in American culture by ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

I have a problem with fashion magazines sometimes – they seem to have these dogmas or uniforms. ‘This is the way you must look; this is this season‘s must-have.’ I really resent the phrase ‘must-have.’ I prefer to decide for myself what I think is beautiful or fashionable.

I think we’re much harder on ourselves than other people are. This is not a unique situation here… But I never liked the ‘Celtic Tiger‘ as a phrase.

There’s a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the ‘hidden imposthume’, and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it’s called ‘the big C’.

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of ‘Tales of Molokai’. It was she who used to say, ‘I myself have seen it,’ after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story – a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘equal pay for equal work.’ Many of those who habitually repeat this mantra may not realize that it is simply a variation of the discredited labor theory of value (LTV), which is generally associated with Marxian economics.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

I’m not the kind of writer that goes, ‘I’m gonna write a song about sunshine,’ or, ‘I’ve just heard a phrase, so I’m gonna write that,’ and then I write a song. I’ll wait for inspiration to hit, and you can’t depend on it.

I’m not big on throwing out the phrase ‘right reasons‘ in Bachelor world. I feel like it’s used too often just because someone is going about a situation in a different way than you.

‘America has no culture!’ is a phrase that we’ve all heard many times in our lives. As is often the case, a lie repeated often enough becomes an assumed truth (kind of like the tall tale of Janeane Garofalo being a comedian).

There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change – or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is – certainly is one of them. But it’s low on my list.

When most of us hear the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn’t exist anywhere in Darwin’s first edition of ‘Origin of the Species.’

I think the phrase ‘computer-literate’ is an evil phrase. You don’t have to be ‘automobile-literate’ to get along in this world. You don’t have to be ‘telephone-literate.’ Why should you have to be ‘computer-literate’?

Taking it in its wider and generic application, I understand faith to be the supplement of sense; or, to change the phrase, all knowledge which comes not to us through our senses we gain by faith in others.

I object to the actual phrase ‘Follow me.’ You’ve gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities – they’re mine. They belong to me.

There will never be another ‘Let’s get ready to rumble,’ so I see it as my duty to protect the phrase as I would a rare gem.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

It’s all well and good to turn in a beautiful poetic phrase that ends up on a pillow but I want there to be a visceral response to what I write.

In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.

Think of the phrase ‘dining institution‘ as a badge of honour. One that is earned after many years, and many more hearts won.

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor’s office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilised society.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill‘s phrase, ‘Never, never, never give up‘, and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to keep on going.

I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase ‘pied a terre’ became literal, material.

The notion of ‘world leadership‘ is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous country by 2034?

The phrase ‘teen hottie’ literally makes me want to throw up.

Bill Clinton‘s incredibly bold idea was to change the grant to a transaction: we’ll give you something, but we demand something back; the way he would phrase it is, ‘We’ll give you opportunity, but you have to take responsibility.’

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

Silicon Valley isn’t the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the ‘Jazz Age,’ and now we’re living in the Hip-Hop Age.

There’s a lot of people over time who have brought out all these funky records that everybody has started jumping on like a catch phrase… When Planet Rock came out, then you had all of the electro funk records.

White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio.

I don’t do nostalgia. The phrase ‘the good old days‘ never passes my lips.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it’s definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I’ve always gravitated towards that feeling.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, ‘Let no one be called happy till his death;’ to which I would add, ‘Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.’

The phrase ‘misuse of privilege’ is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It’s becoming a devalued term, and it’s making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.

Long before Starbucks popularized the phrase ‘the third place’ – somewhere to interact outside of work and home – it was neighborhood restaurants that helped to define places like Union Square.

One phrase we use at Stripe is, ‘Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.’

What we need is congressional action to establish a federal principle of fiduciary duty – encapsulated by the phrase ‘no man can serve two masters.’

Celebrity farmer. Now there’s a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%.

I have a wonderful piano that I really love: a handmade Yamaha grand. Sometimes I’m sitting there, and it sounds so good that I find some little melody or a phrase that leads me into a song, but probably more often than not, I actually grab a notebook.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

For most people, creativity is a serious business. They forget the telling phrase ‘the play of ideas‘ and think that they need to knuckle down and work more. Often, the reverse is true. They need to play.

I’ve always joked that my food memoirs will be titled ‘Brutta ma Buona,’ the phrase Italians use to describe food that’s delicious but rustic-looking at best: ugly but good.

When you’re writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

Throughout my political career, I’ve believed in the concept of home rule. Some call it local control. Whichever phrase you use, the concept is the same – the best decisions are those made closest to those who will be impacted by the decisions.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

I remember being interviewed about my first novel, ‘The Colour of Memory.’ They kept using the expression ‘your first novel,’ and I said, ‘No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.’

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I would never say no to continuing to explore the – somebody coined the phrase for me the other day, which I love – ‘TVDU,’ ‘The ‘Vampire Diaries‘ Universe.’ I have no desire to exploit it, but I also know that there are plenty of opportunities for stories left to be told.

It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.

The dreaded phrase in design circles is ‘show and tell.’

It’s a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you’re doing, it’s therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have ‘sold out.’ Just so you know, if you’re doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has actually started using a phrase lately – ‘Raise our gaze.’ He’s exactly right, too. That’s what I’d like to see in a presidential candidate. I don’t like the bricks being thrown back and forth. That’s not inspiring to me and to most of our electorate, I think.

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.

For you in the West to hear the phrase ‘All men are created equal’ is to draw a yawn. For us, it’s a miracle. We’re starting out at rock bottom, man. But South Africa does have soul.

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

The phrase ‘fake news‘ sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.

This phrase, ‘culture jamming,’ was very much in vogue in the 1990s when these superbrands sort of emerged and started kind of projecting their names onto ever more surfaces.

A lot of people think the orchestra is playing and the conductor doesn’t do very much, but the conductor’s the person that gives shape to the music, gets the phrasing, and if he has really fine musicians in solo spots, the question is does he try to help them phrase, or does he let them go?

The greatest moment of all was her on set, and she said, ‘Would you mind if you change the order of the phrase?’ Maggie Smith asking me if I could change the line, asking politely, using my name!

I don’t really think about the fact that a lot of people are watching ‘DSDS’ or about the way I should phrase my sentences.

To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity.

I’ve always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother’s friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.

Well, I guess my unease with that is… I’m always a little uneasy with that phrase – smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, ‘intellectuals gone bad,’ a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It’s such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can’t think too deeply about that when I’m working, or I’d never get anything down on the page.

Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

A song doesn’t happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

I’ve come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase ‘female friendship,’ because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships.

I have to tell you, I’m a happy man. I’ve lived the life I wanted to live. I’ve written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase – commas and periods, yes – and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know.

Trump uses the phrase ‘America First,’ only dimly aware that he is repeating a phrase from the interwar years and indifferent to its historic resonances. But he compulsively echoes that period – another time when leaders described the world in apocalyptic terms.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet – it’s this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

You always hear the phrase, money doesn’t buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it’s not really true. I got a new car because the old one‘s lease expired.

I’m very fond of this phrase: ‘Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.’ If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you’ll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

I prefer to avoid the phrase ‘strong women‘ when talking about female characters and the lack thereof or the need therefore, because it’s not about being strong, it’s also about being vulnerable, funny etc.

I’ve been using the phrase Black Lives Matter quite a lot. I’m not saying that all lives don’t matter, I’m just saying that right now black people need support and they need help because of the racism going on all around the world.

I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex‘ was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.

To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase… Rather, it’s displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.

All I can tell you is I’m going to be myself. I’m not the type of person that is going to develop into some character or come up with some phrase I will always say.

If you start with a good idea, you can encapsulate it in a phrase and explain it. I like high-concept films. Everyone can get hold of it. I don’t think there’s any harm in that at all.

They say ‘you’ve over trained, you’ve left it in the gym‘ is the most common phrase used in boxing but my god it is the truest.

I don’t understand why it’s not okay to be plus-size. I don’t know why people hate that phrase. Many models have built their careers as plus-size women and then suddenly don’t want to be called that anymore. But you’re still cashing checks from plus-size designers.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I’ll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I’ll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

So much of the time, in politics, we try to come up with these clever turns of phrase, slogans or messages, but what the public really wants is just the simple facts.

We hear a lot about this phrase ‘toxic masculinity‘ but I think the real poison in manhood is silence.

I think I’m writing for an intelligent stranger – you know, in my mind I can’t remember who coined that phrase first. I don’t want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot – mostly when I hear popular music.

After you’ve read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.

The very phrase ‘foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

When we say that Philosophy tries to clear up the meanings of concepts we do not mean that it is simply concerned to substitute some long phrase for some familiar word.

I’ve always been very – for lack of a better phrase – hit-seeking, hit-driven.

I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: ‘A long time ago, in the future.’ Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future.

It’s such an overused phrase: ‘to be part of the conversation.’ But it’s true. It is nice to be part of the conversation – just be sure they are talking about you in the right way.

Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.

We’ve had so many faith-based movies that I think are sub-par; I almost want a new phrase for them.

The phrase ‘blue plate special‘ has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.

Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.

Videogames based on golf have often been viewed as, to mangle a phrase, a good walk through a virtual world spoiled. Connecting with your virtual golfers has often been as hard for gamers as understanding the sport itself.

The way people do an impression of me is they use the phrase, ‘Who are these people who do this… ?’ Then they do some not-quite-good-enough observational humour, which is the most offensive thing.

I’m definitely influenced by the music. We dance to music, and you have to listen to it and phrase your dancing and movement in a certain way to compliment the music. We have to work hand in hand, the dancer and the music.

‘Legality’ is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.

My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase.

I’ve noticed that some Democrats, who seldom mention their faith or maybe never mention their faith, will seize on to a phrase that Pope Francis may have said, and they want to attach themselves to that agenda. Political opportunists is what they are.

When people say ‘love to hate’, they actually mean ‘love to be appalled by’ – if they truly hated them, they’d never repeat a catch phrase.

I think the rule of thumb should be this: if you preface a sentence about a friend with the phrase, ‘I love X, but… ‘ more than once in any conversation, you should stop hanging out with them.

I routinely get e-mails from readers who are disgusted because they feel the race card is played too much and inappropriately. (By the way, can someone put the phrase ‘race card’ in a cryogenic chamber and never thaw it? It demeans what is still a real struggle).

There are so many causes that you care about, but one can’t change or take on the world, so one has to really focus on where you feel you can – to use a very overworked phrase – truly try to do something to make a difference.

To borrow a very popular phrase, I’m a Paul Heyman guy.

The one thing that makes me laugh about the phrase ‘the worst week of my life’ is that nobody actually uses that phrase when something really bad happens.

It’s very hard to imagine the phrase ‘consumer society’ used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

‘It can’t be done’ is not a phrase I recognize.

The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,’ and that is true. Everything I’ve accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It’s just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

In a phrase: I always hope it keeps getting better.

I never thought I’d be using this phrase, but the pursuit of happiness – that’s my right.

South Carolina is a ‘right to work’ state – a misnomer of a phrase, as the laws limits union representation of workers. It does does not guarantee workers a job or fair wages and conditions.

I’m very wary of heroes. I try not to make them in the first place, but there was a phrase Idris Elba spoke a few years back, where he said ‘It’s not about being the next Denzel, it’s about being the first you,’ and I really took that to heart.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

I definitely stand by the phrase that I’m an entertainer and not a role model.

In terms of economic growth, PIMCO originated the famous phrase the ‘new normal.’

I might have created the phrase ‘memory tools‘, but people have always found talismans to help them meditate into a state of hypnosis where they can access their past lives.

I would say ‘competence‘ actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase ‘passionate dentist’ is deeply unnerving.

If we have to sum up the Book of Revelation in one phrase, it would be, ‘Jesus wins.’

The phrase ‘work/life balance‘ encapsulates a depressing outlook.

It is hard to know exactly when the Arab Spring, a phrase used to describe the beginning of the Arab peoples’ demand for democracy and human-rights reform, started.

Have you ever thought how one phrase, one sentence, one troll can ruin someone’s entire life? Why do we interfere in their private lives? Think of others as our properties? And say whatever bitterness is in our hearts without thinking twice?

I work a lot on words, so if I hear a word or see a word or a phrase or a sentence that someone says to me it just immediately sparks a concept.

The phrase ‘perception is reality‘ is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn’t act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.

Do you know the phrase, ‘The word ‘water‘ will not wet you?’ It’s one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

My phrase has always been that I am looking for the versatility of theatre in film. I think I have been quite lucky in that so far.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’

The most common phrase bandied about these days is ‘Oh my God’. People say it automatically all the time – not realising that that’s a form of prayer.

I don’t know what ‘operational control’ of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that’s not true. We do not have operational control.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat‘, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

I don’t buy into the phrase ‘comedy genius.’ It’s like football; you can have the talent, but 90 per cent is hard work, the other ten per cent is trying to make it all look as natural as possible.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, ’cause I’ve got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one… now a British one. I think it’d be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

‘Form follows function‘ comes with so much baggage. It’s a worthless phrase because you’ll never take it for what it means.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Old-fashioned types used to mutter about whether someone was officer-class material. It’s a phrase stuck firmly in the 1950s, but it expresses an underlying truth: either you are fit to lead or you are not.

I live by honor. I live by integrity. I live by ‘never quit.’ It’s not a cool T-shirt phrase for me.

There’s no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I’m performing.

On a professional side, you’ve got a tough problem to fix, Geoff Miller‘s going to do it, and he’s always going to do it to very high standards, and he’s always going to be on the side of right. He’s always talking about ‘what right looks like’ – just a phrase he would always use.

Humour and high seriousness… Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

I don’t have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that’s the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.

Addressing politics in my music’ is such a phrase, a sentence on paper, that I hate. That’s not really me because at the end of the day, I wasn’t a political science major and I wasn’t educated in that sense so I hate when people talk about things they don’t know anything about.

In this culture, the phrase ‘black woman’ is not synonymous with ‘tender,’ or ‘gentle.’ It’s as if those words couldn’t possibly speak to the reality of black females.

Well I’ve never used that phrase before, but yes she is bootylicious.

The phrase ‘private option‘ itself has become politically toxic.

Every time I listen back to solos of mine I’ll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can’t stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don’t think so much like that.

I had a slight hope the phrase ‘spark joy‘ might become popular, as it was the keyword that I wanted to put forward in the first place.

‘Globalization‘ has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it’s nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology – either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.

I love that phrase that parents say to their children when they cry: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about.’

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

Something I miss terribly from the ’60s – the most important phrase in the English language was, ‘I got hung up.’ Somebody says they got hung up, it’s unassailable, you know? You don’t go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

I don’t believe in data-driven anything, it’s the most stupid phrase. Data should always serve people, people should never serve data.

When people hear the phrase ‘risk-taker’, two images come to mind. One is the negative idea of someone who’s reckless and unpredictable, sometimes succeeding and at other times crashing out. The other is a more positive view of a fearless innovator who takes risks when others nervously stand back.

I will take to my grave with me the atmosphere of the first ‘Cursed Child’ preview, because no one knew anything. Only very rarely have I been able to deploy the phrase ‘audible gasps.’

‘Islamist terrorism.’ The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world’s population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.

I wrote about 22 plays before ‘When You Cure Me,’ which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there’s a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There’s not. They’re dire.

I’ve always had a will to succeed, to win, however you phrase it.

There definitely isn’t a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I’ll just write down a phrase, or I’ll have an idea that’s attached to just a few chords. Other times, it’s work.

Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British – a nation for whom the phrase: ‘How are you?’ really means: ‘Please say one word, then leave me alone.’

Disinterested public service has become, just so… what’s the phrase, ‘old school.’

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it’s almost too obvious, or it’s too expected. And it’s not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

I know that ‘boots on the ground‘ is a scary phrase and that the Western world has gotten used to sterile attacks.

I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases – I’m addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

You’ve heard the phrase ‘There are no small roles, just small actors?’ Well, I kind of disagree. There are small roles, but when you get a lot of them in a row, you can become a pretty successful actress, and that’s what I’ve done.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase ‘organ failure’ will disappear.

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

My favorite phrase is, ‘God only gives struggles to people who can overcome it.’ I saw it in a book, and it helped me out so much.

My least favorite phrase in the English language is ‘I don’t care.’

This is the way that I like to phrase it: we want to focus on 100% of the problem, and you can only focus on 100% of global emissions if you have technology that is exportable, clean, reliable, and cheap.

I don’t think of myself as a character actress – that’s become a phrase which means you’ve had it.

Do you ever think about the fact that Jesus never said a mumbling word? You may have heard that phrase before, but how much have you ever thought about it?

The last thing I’d ever want to see is another manager being sacked. I certainly don’t like the phrase ‘sacking season.’

I hate negativity. I hate people who say the phrase ‘I hate’. I really don’t like the word ‘hate.’ Dislike, frightened of, terrified of, or yukky – but not ‘hate.’

The best timed joke or the best timed phrase comes at spontaneous moments and just relies on me as the host to be very quick, and that’s what I do.

Every day I wake up I am thankful and every night I am very thankful that I’ve made a career out of the phrase ‘Let’s get ready to rumble!’

I guess if I had to put it into a single phrase, the moral of the Frank stories is that the hammer never really falls.

I can only appreciate the kind of work that goes into being a top drag queen. Ru Paul looks just astonishing as a woman. And he’s got this fantastic turn of phrase. I find him hilarious.

I don’t believe in God, though I’m not prepared to call myself an atheist either. You know the old phrase: ‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’ I’ve never been in a foxhole, and if I ever find myself in a foxhole, I’ll let you know if I believe in God or not.

I reject the idea of work-life balance. The phrase is a bald-faced lie, designed to hang over the human psyche like the Sword of Damocles, because balance presumes an even distribution of weight, of value. But anyone who has ever lived understands that no set of tips or tricks can create a lifestyle equilibrium.

I use a lot more chords than most organists and I’m careful to phrase them with the guitar.

I’m probably a guy’s girl, although I hate that phrase. I tend to have more close male friends than I do female friends, and I always have. I would say that of my 10 close friends, seven are men.

My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that’s my dad. And he was a very good man.

If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.

Warren Buffett is famous for talking about the ‘intrinsic value’ of stocks. But while many people parrot this phrase, few know what it really means.

There is a phrase in French, which means ‘to miss.’ To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can’t work for different reasons.

Among intellectuals who consider themselves ‘scientific,’ the phrase ‘the nature of man’ is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.

Songs are out there – they’re waiting to be grabbed. I start with a phrase, musical and lyrical, words like ‘I don’t think so’ and a nice riff. It rolls from there.

The phrase ‘All is fair in love and war’ must have been penned by a divorce attorney.

We’ve never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.

I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately – a song – and once I start, I have to finish it.

To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I’ve done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.

I love to read scripts. But I am very happy right now to say that I am a working actor. In this town of Los Angeles, the phrase ‘I’m an actor’ is overrated. So, I like to say, ‘I’m a working actor.’

The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be ‘What the hell you mean we’re out of missiles?’

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam – everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there’s no doubt that moment has passed.