“He can be a charming man, but he can be quite nasty too. Because this is what he does.”
Louis van Gaal (1951) Dutch footballer and manager
About Marco van Basten after the fall-out with Mark van Bommel
“He can be a charming man, but he can be quite nasty too. Because this is what he does.”
Louis van Gaal (1951) Dutch footballer and manager
About Marco van Basten after the fall-out with Mark van Bommel
Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army
During a lecture on leadership quoted in [Field Marshal KM Kariappa Memorial Lectures, 1995-2000, http://books.google.com/books?id=Eux31FCNj8MC&pg=PA21, 2001, Lancer Publishers, 978-81-7062-119-5, 21–]
“I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”
Newton N. Minow (1926) United States attorney and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
Speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 9, 1961 (the Wasteland Speech)
Context: When television is good, nothing--not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers--nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
“I assure you I had rather be the first man here than the second man in Rome.”
Julius Caesar (-100–-44 BC) Roman politician and general
On passing through a village in the Alps, as attributed in Parallel Lives, by Plutarch, as translated by John Langhorne and William Langhorne (1836), p. 499
Variant: First in a village rather than second in Rome.
“A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.”
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
“The more someone assures you that everything is okay, the more you can be assured that it's not.”
Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer
Source: The Walk
“Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man! But I assure you, my music is not.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer
Source: movie Amadeus (1984)
““Can I trust you, my friend?”
“If you can’t, then what is my assurance worth?””
Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon
Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 4, “Boy meets Girl”, p. 48