Top 575 Were Quotes

Here we have the best Were Quotes from famous authors such as Barack Obama, RM, Robin Cook, Erykah Badu, Rudyard Kipling. Find the perfect quotation from our collection.

Now, as a nation, we don't promise equal outcomes, but
Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

The concept of The ‘Most Beautiful Moment in Life’, that was chapter one for us; it feels like that because we were starting from the bottom, but on this concept, ‘Love Yourself‘, we started to talk about some brighter things, like the real things in life.

There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.

Robin Cook
And I figured out that the reason I couldn’t get through the day as well as I can now is because I had too many things on my mind, on my plate, you know, for one person to have. So I started to eliminate some of the things that were too heavy to carry and unnecessary.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.

Life is so fast. And I still remember when I came up to the big leagues and played as if it were yesterday. Time flies.

I don’t feel like millions of people are wrong because they love who they love or they were born how they were born.

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

It’s just so cool when you meet people who are different than you are. That can give you a different perspective, a viewpoint on life, or inspire you. I mean, what would the world be like if we were all the same? I think it would be very boring.

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

There were some great clinicians in the 20th centurygreat men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius – there’s a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends.

Alphonsus Liguori
The most valuable investment we can make is in our children’s education. When we make education a priority, we give our children opportunity. Opportunity to learn at higher levels than their parents were able to learn; to earn at higher levels than we were able to earn.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

Ah, if I were not king, I should lose my temper.

Louis XIV
In the 1950s and ’60s, America’s natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation’s most polluted waterways.

Y’know, you can’t please all the people all the time… and last night, all those people were at my show.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Dante Alighieri
How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

Gianni Versace
Kind words are the music of the world. They have a power which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were some angel’s song, which had lost its way and come on Earth, and sang on undyingly, smiting the hearts of men with sweetest wounds, and putting for the while an angel’s nature into us.

Frederick William Faber
It’s worth pointing out that conflicts between racially oppressed people often result from the fact that colonialism worked on divide and rule. Certain ethnic, religious, racial or indigenous groups were deliberately privileged over others in order to create a sense of investment in upholding the power structure.

Jim Carrey and my dad were best friends. He would always be in my house and stuff like that.

Damon Wayans Jr
I got two older brothers and two younger sisters, and we grew up in the country, and we were a little feral. So as long as the car didn’t end up in the rhubarb and you didn’t get caught for doing whatever you were doing, you were fine.

Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.

My mom raised us like we were still in the Philippines. She tried to cure everything at home like a real Filipino woman. You had to die to go to the hospital. My mom cured everything with Vicks VapoRub. I should’ve died nine times when I was a kid!

We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right.

Abbie Hoffman
If a projectile were deprived of the force of gravity, it would not be deflected toward the earth but would go off in a straight line into the heavens and do so with uniform motion, provided that the resistance of the air were removed.

If I weren’t doing what I’m doing today… I’d be traveling around the world on the back of a motorcycle.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.

Mary Shelley
I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience. That’s why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present – deja vu.

They call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken.

Raymond Floyd
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal… I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

Christopher McCandless
If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

The world is wide. No two days are alike, nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

If we’d know we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts – we have learned only recently how close we were to war – but I knew enough to make me tremble.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion – namely, that I myself could not think at all.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

I learned conservatism through my grandfather; I didn’t know that was the name. I didn’t know these were conservative principles. Starting his life on a sharecropping farm. Working tremendously hard. Five years old, picking cotton and laying tobacco out to dry on a farm, and today he now owns that farm.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.

The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

The Club Kids were about fun. Wild, messy fun – the more debauched, the better.

James St James
I knew at an early age I wanted to act. Acting was always easy for me. I don’t believe in predestination, but I do believe that once you get where ever it is you are going, that is where you were going to be.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

He was a very strict father, which in a way has helped me to become who I am today. He never pampered me, as he wanted me to live a normal life. No film magazines were allowed at home, and we weren’t allowed to watch any movies.

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.

Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.

If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.

At Barca, players were banned from driving their sports cars to training.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

Andrew Johnson
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.

While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

I think, under President Obama, who was a really bright guy – I didn’t agree with a lot of his politics – but we got to the point internationally where our friends didn’t trust us. They were confused. And our enemies didn’t quite respect us.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

Before the palefaces came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.

Tecumseh
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

There were many people who tried to insult me and never appreciated me in the beginning. The biggest platform for me I would say more than South Industry, I will say was ‘Bigg Boss’. They made me realise who I am and what all I can do in my life.

Nikki Tamboli
Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

P G Wodehouse
When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

And yeah, my handicap was down to a 10 when we were at the thick of it. I trained for six or seven months, golfing every day for six hours, seven days a week, with eight trainers. It was intense.

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a ‘fresh‘ brain – one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn’t observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.

I guess if there weren’t luck involved, I’d win ’em all.

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it.

In every age ‘the good old days‘ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Brooks Atkinson
Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

Athletics are not my wheelhouse because sports were mean to this uncoordinated kid growing up, a 6-foot-2 14-year-old who never could do a layup.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristophanes
Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.

Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

If there were no night, we would not appreciate the day, nor could we see the stars and the vastness of the heavens. We must partake of the bitter with the sweet. There is a divine purpose in the adversities we encounter every day. They prepare, they purge, they purify, and thus they bless.

Everybody loves a picnic in the sunshine. It was always so magical when we were kids.

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

People were not even knowing that women’s cricket existed. And from that phase to today where people would want to follow women’s cricket, I think we have come a long way.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Hot Lips changed a lot in eleven years. Initially, Margaret Houlihan behaved as though a man were the only thing that could complete her life, and she didn’t see what richness her life contained. She gained a lot of self-esteem through the years, and she came to realize that what she did, what she offered, was valuable.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.

Most patients enter a doctor‘s office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.

Frederick the Great
The Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people’s hearts… his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them.

George Fox
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.

The soldiers that didn’t come back were the heroes. It’s a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you’re a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you’re a survivor.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

If I were in a room full of people, I’d rather be the person who is more interesting than the one who is wallpaper.

If you do what you were born to do, I think you will never grow old.

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who ‘disappeared‘. That’s what the candle is for.

Peter Benenson
I’ve realized through the years that I just find happiness in other things, whether it’s my dogs or my friends or, like, looking at the sunset. So if I were to wish for something else, it would just to be happy all the time, to have a superpower of not letting things affect me, and to be true to who I am, always.

My dad’s cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.

The original ‘Hobbit‘ was never intended to have a sequel – Bilbo ‘remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long’: a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.

The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we’ll get used to it. I’m sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.

Never tell anyone outside my staff that the Submarine Force and the First Air Fleet were responsible for the failure at Midway. The failure at Midway was mine.

Once there were two brothers: one ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice-President-and nothing was ever heard from either of them again.

Thomas R Marshall
With such evidence, as well as the sealed doorway between the two guardian statues of the King, the mystery gradually dawned upon us. We were but in the anterior portion of a tomb.

Howard Carter
I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.

Joseph R McCarthy
Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

My heroes are and were my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes.

A friend is, as it were, a second self.

My teenage years were exactly what they were supposed to be. Everybody has their own path. It’s laid out for you. It’s just up to you to walk it.

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. ‘Alien’, ‘Blade Runner‘ just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

The people who have impacted the world didn’t live long. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. These people who impact the world were not old people, but they lived so effectively that we cannot erase them from history.

During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable country affords. My approach to Zionism was through Americanism.

My mom and dad are from the streets. My mom’s from Chicago. My dad’s from Memphis. My dad got out of school and got with my mom. They were hustlers. They were from the streets. They were doing their thing. The streets ain’t got no love for the streets. You can light up the streets, or be a victim of the streets.

Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn’t do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.

Paul A Volcker
If I were to be Miss Universe, I will use my voice to influence the youth and I would raise awareness to certain causes like HIV awareness that is timely and relevant to my country which is the Philippines.

When a coil is operated with currents of very high frequency, beautiful brush effects may be produced, even if the coil be of comparatively small dimensions. The experimenter may vary them in many ways, and, if it were nothing else, they afford a pleasing sight.

Everyone has a favourite cake, pastry, pudding or pie from when they were kids.

My mom and dad – they were always there. They were always on the set. They focused on our family life. The entertainment business wasn’t the end-all. They weren’t out to get the next big paycheck or the next big movie. It was about ‘What can we do as a family.’

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

All of my favorite people – people I really trust – none of them were cool in their younger years.

If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.

Paul Kantner
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness – and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Madeleine L’Engle
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.

The signing of the Sex Pistols was a turning point for Virgin. It put the company on the map and, over the years, attracted bands such as Genesis, the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, and Janet Jackson. It also attracted Culture Club, who were ground-breaking.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn’t even have when you were on your own.

Eddie Cantor
I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.

Today’s younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.

Al Capp
I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

When I was a kid, nobody in my family had a car. And I didn’t have many toys. The only toys I had were the ones I would steal.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

I’ll never forget Hurricane Katrina – the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

Cedric Richmond
I’m an extremist so I’m either hated or loved. I think it’s down to when I first got to Formula One not always knowing what I was saying, saying things that mean one thing but people were taking the other way and then people don’t forget.

My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life – that is, to be happy.

Coy Wire played in the NFL for 9 years and is now a motivational speaker and has a book out called ‘Change Your Mind.’ He is an amazing person with such positive energy! When Kroy and I first met and started dating, there weren’t a whole lot of people that supported us, but Coy always did.

My brother and I were brought up outdoors. We appreciate the countryside; we appreciate nature and everything about it.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

I grew up in a family with three siblings. My parents were always very supportive and encouraging. It was important for them that we have meaningful and satisfying professions, but they didn’t care as much about success and achievement.

Maryam Mirzakhani
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn’t have electricity.

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It’s almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I’m spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.

When President Obama entered the White House, the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America’s bravest, our men and women in uniform, were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history.

I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now; relaxed! Cause when I heard the police car I knew they weren’t coming after me!

‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.

Shaquille and I kind of joke we were the Christopher Columbus of social media. We’re kind of out on a boat by ourselves going through these uncharted waters. But it’s become more understood, embraced and accepted, and now it’s pretty much expected by fans for athletes, leagues and teams to be there.

There were moments when I really just thought, I don’t need anything and I don’t need anyone. I just want to go away and disappear.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

William Julius Wilson
The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, ‘I have just lost the love of my life.’

I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just – there wasn’t a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.

My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.

You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.

I take after my mother more than my father in terms of personality. My mother’s a worrier, and I’m a worrier. Both were very good with numbers and mathematics, so I kind of got that from both of them.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

The Myth of Male Power dealt much more with the political issues, the legal issues, sexual harassment, date rape, women who kill, and those issues were very much more interfaced with the agendas of feminism.

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law.

St Jerome
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

The fact that I am not formally trained never really bothered me. There were times I knew it could have been a brownie point, had I been trained, but it never pulled me back.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Cesare Pavese
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.

Vulnerability is the strongest state to be in. How boring would it be if we were constantly dominant or constantly submissive?

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

I grew up with an incredibly loving and supportive family that gave me the impression there were a lot of options for me out there.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.

The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

Abbie Hoffman
There are many talented people who haven‘t fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.

Challenge yourself, grow, blossom, and become who you were meant to be. Don’t ever stay at a job solely out of convenience or comfort. Aim higher, even if that means pursuing another job that’s just one step closer to your ultimate goal.

Stateless people are hidden. During the 2011 refugee crises, it was obvious that people were fleeing Somalia and Libya – there was a lot of international attention. Statelessness goes undetected because stateless people are in legal limbo and are afraid to show up.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

I think it’s difficult to say what exactly made me become a successful DJ. It depends on so many different things. If I were given an award, I would thank my family, friends, Tiesto and the great team behind me for all their support and hard work. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

In my case, I can sincerely say that nothing is impossible… When I was saying I want to be No. 1 of the world, and I was seven or eight years old, most of the people were laughing at me because it seems like I have one percent of chances to do that, and I’ve done it.

My husband. He keeps me grounded. If I were in the world on my own, it would all be much more seductive. But I’m in a relationship that has nothing to do with the film world.

At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.

Leon Bourgeois
We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean… and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.

When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Eric Bristow is only 27.

When ‘Top Gun’ came out, my sisters were like, ‘Oh, my God, ‘Top Gun!’ Tom Cruise!’ And I very confidently said, ‘I’m going to marry him one day.’ It wasn’t like, ‘How do I get to Tom Cruise?’ It was just, ‘I think I’m going to marry him. Why not? He’ll like me. I’m fun.’

If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.

I think it would be cool if you were writing a ransom note on your computer, if the paper clip popped up and said, ‘Looks like you’re writing a ransom note. Need help? You should use more forceful language, you’ll get more money.’

I liked St. Louis, when they were in the American League, because that was going home. I had all my family and friends there.

‘The Beatles’ did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.

When I was with the Yankees in 1978, we were playing Baltimore at Yankee Stadium, and the score was 3 – 3 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. I led off against Tippy Martinez – a little left-hander who always gave me trouble – and the count went to three-and-oh.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

Betty Smith
It doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, your sexual preference, the region where you were born, your gender. We’re all equal… We can’t take certain minorities and think they have super powers and are different from the others.

The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

If I were offered a cochlear implant today, I would prefer not to have one. But that’s not a statement about hearing aids or cochlear implants. It’s about who you are.

A lot of music influences me in other ways than this, but I’ve always taken a lot of influence from Stevie Wonder, Frank Ocean, and Jeff Rosenstock for the Rex music. They were also the first three artists that released albums where I enjoyed every song.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.

I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!

If your dad died before you were born, yeah, it hurts – but it’s not like you had a connection with something that was real. Not to say it’s any better – but to have that connection and then have it ripped away was, like, the worst. My dad was such a good dad that when he left, he left a huge scar. He was my superhero.

I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help… Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

When I was 12, my feet were so small, I wore my sisters’ glitter shoes. My dad would whoop me: ‘You’re not going to school now, you’ll embarrass us!’

Among the difficulties I encountered, economic problems were the worst. I found that financial hardships could limit one’s ability to realize one’s dream, no matter how desperate and earnest you are.

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.

We danced on the lip of the volcano, so to speak. We were young, too. And New York was still a big, open city where anything could happen and anyone could be star. Rents were cheap, creativity was encouraged, and bottle service was still 20 years away. That was the era the Club Kids came into.

James St James
I used to choose friends based on similarity in age and life stage, but I’ve learned that those were the wrong criteria. Trying to live life exclusively alongside others our own age is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa. It’s a little dangerous.

I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior. From them, I take my only existence.

Tecumseh
Presence of God’ is really that understanding that sometimes when you step out of your own shoes and just open your ears and listen to what’s going on around you, you get answers to the questions you were asking.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I’ve gotten from so many of the adult elders.

Because I knew how hard I worked, I knew the pain, I knew the sacrifice, I knew the tears, I knew everything. Despite everything, I stuck to it. I toughed it out, and I kept my head in the game, even when the odds were against me.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

The weirdest place I ever actually woke up in was a villa on the beach in Mexico. It was burning hot, and there were all these crabs walking around me. But I was feeling good, so I went with the vibe.

Future
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

All men were made by the Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do. Never for an instant harbor a doubt of it.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.

The groves were God’s first temples.

Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.

If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.

You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

When I was younger, I had some close friends who always loved European football, and Real Madrid at that time were the dominant force. I remember family holidays when we used to go to Spain, and we’d bring back replica shirts of Real Madrid and pretend to be the players when we played in the park.

My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.

When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.

The meals were served in a large hall, in which Moctezuma was accustomed to eat, and the dishes quite filled the room, which was covered with mats and kept very clean.

Hernan Cortes
They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

I am not like a pebble on the beach – a grain of sand on the seashore or just one of millions of human beings past, present and future. No, I am a unique human being loved by God as if I were an only child – the only fruit of his creative powers.

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

Arthur Hugh Clough
I remember at one time there were 44 mining MPs.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others’ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.

What you don’t want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the eighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.

My degree is in biology, and it will always be my first love. Evolution, ecology, genetics – they were the textbooks I was devouring as a teenager, and it was there that my love of science grew.

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.

Most people are dead. Did you know that? It’s true, out of all the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead.

Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school’s steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn’t have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

Mo Yan
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

My teacher told me I’d never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

I’m the first to admit that we were totally dependent on a particular place and time… for us, seeing Minor Threat at the CBGB hardcore matinee was just as necessary a force in our lives as the Treacherous Three at Club Negril or the Funky Four + One More at the Rock Lounge.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

I hated baseball. I really didn’t like baseball at all until someone decided they were going to pay me… Every year I played in the big leagues, the day the season ended, I called my buddies in West Virginia and said, ‘I’ll be home tomorrow.’

John Kruk
If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

The difference between keeping things clean and keeping kids clean was that things just sat still and waited for the dirt to collect. We kids were carriers. We ran a pickup and delivery service.

Sam Levenson
If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

Throughout my life, there are four people I’ve met who were truly original people. The other three were Groucho Marx, Jim Morrison, and Pablo Picasso.

The good ole days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

Life is about choices. Some we regret, some were proud of. Some will haunt us forever. ‘Black Rain’ was very much about choices. The message – we are what we chose to be.

Graham Brown
I was a product of Andy Warhol‘s Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.

I have some girls who I look back on and I think, ‘Wow, they were really horrible to me.’ I would love an apology from a few girls, but whatever. I’m not holding any grudges. I’m over it.

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

Ludwig von Mises
It’s no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.

Thomas More
Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

The Brexit thing to me just looks like a difference of opinion. I know things were lied about, but that should be a wake-up call to get all the information before you vote about something. Educate yourself.

Me and John Mayer met via a mutual connect, we were by the studio and he asked If I could play him my music. When he heard ‘Under The Influence,’ he asked if he could be a part of the track and of course, we made that happen.

Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn’t death of things, then there wouldn’t be any life to celebrate.

I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.

Ingrid Bergman
If it weren’t for Miyamoto-san, I wouldn’t be where I am.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn’t eat lunch.

Even when we talked about child labor, we were frowned upon. But then you know that you have to speak the truth irrespective of the repercussions.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present.

Franz Boas
My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I’ve endured over the past twenty-five years.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.

When terrorists attacked the symbols of our national unity and strength, they failed to realize that they were just symbols of our strength. The real strength of our nation comes from our people – not our buildings.

Michael Enzi
Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Remember the sufferings of Christ, the storms that were weathered… the crown that came from those sufferings which gave new radiance to the faith… All saints give testimony to the truth that without real effort, no one ever wins the crown.

I was born in Faridabad but brought up in Delhi and Mumbai. My father had been living hand-to-mouth and literally slept on railway platforms when he came to Mumbai for the first time to become a film singer. My parents were both singers; they sang together and fell in love due to their singing.

I work as if I were going to be the next person to need a respirator. I share in the benefits I bestow on others, and my work has enriched my life.

Forrest Bird
In the late ’60s, there were the the three B’s: The Beatles, Batman, and Bond.

The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.

Photography was a way for me to freeze time and to capture the moments that were happy and healthy. I saw a photo as a way to go back to a memory if I ever needed to.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

I grew up in the ghetto, and the thing is when there were problems, I knew when to get away.

I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef‘s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

I tell students that the opportunities I had were a result of having a good educational background. Education is what allows you to stand out.

Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test, and there were a thousand ways to fail, a thousand ways to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else’s standards of what was accepted, of what was normal.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never never never!

William Pitt
The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.

Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included.

If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t they never were.

Before I had a double mastectomy, I was already pretty flat-chested, and I made so many jokes over the years about how small my chest was that I started to think that maybe my boobs overheard me… and were just like, ‘You know what? We’re sick of this. Let’s kill her.’

There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.

Charity bestowed upon those who are worthy of it is like good seed sown on a good soil that yields an abundance of fruits. But alms given to those who are yet under the tyrannical yoke of the passions are like seed deposited in a bad soil. The passions of the receiver of the alms choke, as it were, the growth of merits.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight.

George Gobel
I was born in Orange County – in Santa Ana. My dad is from California. I was raised on the East Coast. My first two years were in California, but I claim East Coast. I’m sorry, I don’t rep California.

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.

I acted all the way up until Princeton. It was just one of my favorite extracurricular activities. Then I got to Princeton and had a really conservative vibe. All my friends were planning on law school, med school, or Wall Street, and suddenly acting seem like a really risky proposition.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Money is often a matter of chance or good fortune and is not the mark of a successful life. It is not the thing that brings a throb of pleasure or a thrill into my life. And I would not pose as a successful man if that were to be the measure.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

The idea of a spiritual heart transplant is a vivid image to me; once you have the heart of somebody else inside you, then that heart is there. Jesus‘ heart is inside me, and my heart is gone. So if God were to place a stethoscope against my chest, he would hear the heart of Jesus Christ beating.

Millions of Americans were duped by the federal government and the Federal Reserve into buying homes they could not afford and failed to count the cost. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, they could not keep up the monthly mortgage payments and defaulted.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.

Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they’re spiritual and telling stories like ‘Whale Rider‘ and ‘Once Were Warriors,’ quite serious stuff, but we’re pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

If two people were exactly alike, one of them would be unnecessary.

Larry Dixon
Our teachers made such a difference – all my teachers and professors were very supportive and nurturing.

Katherine Johnson
I’ll say initially acting was my first love, and that’s what I pursued. But then, so far as even my first day on a film set, and just watching how things were set up, I just said, ‘I think I want to be in charge.’ I am very much type-A. I am a bit of a control freak.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

If I were president of the United States, I’d build a great wall along the Mexican border and not let anybody in.

Dave Mustaine
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief – the other contempt.

I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

Galileo Galilei
Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‘This is what I asked for.’

If I were to pray in Arabic, I’d pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I’d pray to God.

I feel like I’ve lived quite a sheltered life, like my mom and dad were quite protective of me.

One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts… to my surprise… almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.

Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things.

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

I was a piano major with Craig Robinson from ‘The Office.’ Me and Craig were very close in college at Illinois State University… It’s so bizarre to see us out here now doing things.

Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world. There was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.

Margaret H Hamilton
I grew up idolising Madhuri Dixit, though I wasn’t a Hindi film buff. I had an academic upbringing, and movies were a rarity. I looked up to Madhuri because I loved dancing, and she’s a fantastic dancer.

I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch ‘Titanic,’ and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.

The golden age was when people were starting to understand what hip-hop was and how to use it. I was lucky to come up then. Everybody wanted to be original and have substance; it was somewhat conscious… There was an integrity that people respected.

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

Oprah‘s got good politics, she’s got a good heart, and she’ll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we’re Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God’s grandchild.

Dante Alighieri
We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes. They were trained to be perfect.

Margaret H Hamilton
‘Twenty One Pilots’ is a play by Arthur Miller, who also wrote ‘All My Sons.’ It’s about a guy who’s creating and developing parts for airplanes in war time, when it comes to his attention that some of these parts were faulty.

Josh Dun
I come from a long line of strong and confident women out of New Orleans. My grandmother and great-grandmother were women who ran their homes and were leaders in their communities. I was never taught that there was anything that I couldn’t do, and I believed that.

Stephanie Allain
What attracted me to Jimmy Bulger were the various facets of his personality and his humanity because I felt that the only way I could approach playing a character like him was to find his human side first and then map that out to see where it took the turn. He was a very complicated man.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Thomas J Watson
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.

I didn’t know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

Marie Windsor
Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

P G Wodehouse
The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

I had a real bad attitude after my dad passed of liver cancer. I was 9, and we were really close.

O! Desolated Scotland, too credulous of fair speeches, and not aware of the calamities which are coming upon you! If you were to judge as I do, you would not easily put your neck under a foreign yoke.

I invented ‘It’s a good thing’ before you were even born.

I’m thankful because all the hard work and sacrifices were worth it in the end.

WizKid
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were.

I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.

Ruth Ann Minner
Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities… space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

I chose as my target the University of Mississippi, which in 1960 was the holiest temple of white supremacy in America, next to the U.S. Capitol and the White House, both of which were under the control of segregationists and their collaborators.

When I was young we weren’t even allowed to speak our own languages in school. They called it ‘vernacular,’ as if only English was the real tongue.

We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth – then it’s far too late when they pass away.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

The world is not black and white; there are lots of shades of grey. There are good things and bad things in every era, and I think it’s kind of very blindfolded to say one era was wonderful, as it was wonderful, but there were a lot of bad things as well.

Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property… Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

When I was playing in the Ajax youth teams – when I was, say, 14, 15 – you started to get all those international youth tournaments. All those English teams came. Well, the English were much further than we were.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.

Mary Shelley
We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.

Patricia Sun
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn’t speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.

I lived next to Russian soldiers. We had Russian army guys in our house when I grew up. We made lemonade for them; they were everywhere. I had a Russian school. I grew up with Russian traditions, I know Russian songs… it infiltrates me a lot. I even speak a little Russian.

Till Lindemann
You don’t have to have anything in common with people you’ve known since you were five. With old friends, you’ve got your whole life in common.

I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

Sam Ervin
When I look back at my past mistakes, I realise that there were times when I wasn’t myself, and that’s why certain styles did not work well for me.

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack – as were the CIA and the rest of the world.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy‘s First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.

There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

Georges Cuvier
Growing up, I knew I was different. But I didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal. I just knew that I had a really big, extended family. I was taught nothing about who we were or where we came from.

If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.

Carl Perkins
For a long time, men weren’t respecting women. They weren’t understanding Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the Motherland, all the motherly stuff. And now we are.

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.

Quick Change’ was my first real movie. It was an interesting audition process because there were no lines in the script. Bill Murray’s character would say something, and Geena Davis and Randy Quaid would say something, and then it would just say, ‘The cabbie speaks.’ How do you audition for that?

Most of us weren’t born with a silver spoon in our mouth, but if life dealt you all the wrong cards, you still have to play.

That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.

The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

How can I be in two places at once, unless I were a bird?

Boyle Roche
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

My father was a general manager with Hyatt, so we lived in the hotel so he would be close by if there were any problems. My mum was always adamant about us not abusing it. So I still had to clean my room. Housekeeping would never come and do it.

You were designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.

I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny – because it’s powerful; it’s a threat.

It’s true the punk fashion itself was iconographic: rips and dirt, safety pins, zips, slogans, and hairstyles. These motifs were so iconic in themselves – motifs of rebellion.

To the people I forgot, you weren’t on my mind for some reason and you probably don’t deserve any thanks anyway.

The bicycle kick is not easy to do. I scored 1,283 goals, and only two or three were bicycle kicks.

I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.

We weren’t put here to be miserable. We were put here to do the best we can, and we should take our energy and improve our state of being.

Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?

George Gobel
If I were to give advice, I would say to parents that they ought to be very careful whom they allow to mix with their children when young; for much mischief thence ensues, and our natural inclinations are unto evil rather than unto good.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

We were all born with a certain degree of power. The key to success is discovering this innate power and using it daily to deal with whatever challenges come our way.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

Life is a terminal condition. Were all going to die. Cancer patients just have more information, but we all, in some ways, wait for permission to live.

If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old – somebody who takes good care of things and of people.

The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.

I was born in very sorry circumstances. Both of my parents were very sorry.

Unlike other Jewish families, we didn’t go out for Chinese food on Sundays, but we spent our time in a world of baking powder biscuits and the best shrimp cocktails that ever were.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.

My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.

Jacob Rothschild
What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown – watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?

My earliest memories of rap music was mixed with my earliest memories of reggae music. They were big sounds around the way, heavy bass lines, strong messages, definitely.

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding – that, for me, was the American Dream.

Renzo Rosso
Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt ‘safe‘ there.

Robert Cormier
One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

The problem with EMMA is that it is cost prohibitive for the small investors who were supposed to benefit from the new transparency.

I cut off my dreadlocks, but I couldn’t face throwing them away. They were so hard to grow, man. There’s a lot of work goes into those things. Some people keep a diary or a photo album to remind them of their past lives – well, I’ve got hair. Who knows? One day, maybe my grandchildren might want to see it.

My mom was born in Korea – Seoul, Korea, during the ’50s, ’51. She was abandoned; her and my uncle were abandoned. My grandfather was a Seabee and adopted my mom and my uncle, and brought them to Compton in the ’50s. That’s where she was raised.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

Carl Bernstein
My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

Everybody said you’re never going to win this whole Classic. You’re not strong enough. You’re big, you’re athletic, you’re fast – but you will never win this Arnold Classic. Those were the people who didn’t believe in me… I put in the work every single day – and here I am, three times champ!

My mother and dad were big animal lovers, too. I just don’t know how I would have lived without animals around me. I’m fascinated by them – both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me, and it’s made such a difference in my lifetime.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Hilaire Belloc
I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

Jean-Michel Basquiat
The moment in between what you once were, and who you are now becoming, is where the dance of life really takes place.

I believe that every single one of us, celebrity or not, has a responsibility to get involved in trying to make a difference in the world. Our generation faces many challenges, some of which were passed on to us by the past generations, but it’s up to us to find solutions today so that we don’t keep passing our problems on.

To me, the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential… With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg, as a person, as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style, the way all the players dressed nice, you know, kept their hair looking good, drove sharp cars and they talked real slick.

If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

David Hilbert
People were saying that David Geffen and I had gotten married and it just blew me away. Not that they thought I was gay, but that they thought I could land a guy that hot.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

My second divorce was the worst kind of divorce. There were two children; one had just been born. My husband was in love with someone else.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

I was in New Zealand and met this girl. Her sister dared me to bungee jump, so I did! It was a spur-of-the-moment decision – I wanted to impress the girl, and it worked! We were in a relationship after that.

DJ Envy‘s definitely talk about me, but I’m one of many. I was under the assumption that he had kids but wasn’t actually married. I found out around the time that I started filming ‘Love & Hip Hop.’ After I found out, I was still in shock because we were together for so long.

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

My father being a soldier, every time I saw soldiers marching – ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘my father’s that,’ and these soldiers were always looking magnificent. And I thought they were powerful; they were all-powerful. I knew that they were an elite in India.

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn’t hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.

We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.

Katherine Johnson
My yachts were, I suppose, outstanding status symbols.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods’ bodies the same shape as their own.

Xenophanes
You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.

Isadora Duncan
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson‘s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

I knew I was an unwanted baby when I saw that my bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead – and that one was myself.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

One of the positives of getting older is that you forget your age. Then you find out that you’re younger than you thought you were.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

In a Balenciaga you were the only woman in the room – no other woman existed.

Diana Vreeland
There’s nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it’s a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

It’s fun, and a laugh for you… you can boo me and feel happy about yourself because you’re part of the crowd that did that. But deep down there were people in that crowd booing me because of my Aboriginality.

There were times when close people… Some of my closest friends have left me. People hurt me, so everything fell apart. I didn’t feel like I had anyone on my side or anyone who could understand me. So that’s why I completely fell apart.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.

You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.

Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Along the way, let’s never forget that once we were children and that we were all playing together without distinction of skin color, society level, or where people come from. Adults need to remember to play and to be more childlike in our behavior. We’ve forgotten what that childlike experience was like.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

I did meet ‘The Everly Brothers’ once, and we talked for awhile. Then we figured out we were first cousins! My late mother was the sister of Don and Phil’s father, Ike Everly.

James Best
My mother and father didn’t love each other, so they were always fighting.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.

Dorothea Brande
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

I think I’m just always myself, and I think that’s what’s most important to me. Just be genuine. Be authentic. Be who you are and who you were meant to be. And celebrate that. Celebrate all of that.

That’s what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it’s fair, because people would be the best if they weren’t discriminated against.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

When you don’t manage your life well, you become angry and frustrated as things don’t go as intended, and our bad mood is a sign showing we were not able to resolve the conflict.

Jorge Bucay
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

It was the wont of the immortal gods sometimes to grant prosperity and long impunity to men whose crimes they were minded to punish in order that a complete reverse of fortune might make them suffer more bitterly.

Julius Caesar
If poverty were a man, I would have slain him.

Ali ibn Abi Talib
If I were obliged to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.

My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.

School shootings were invented by blacks… and stolen by the white man.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.