Quotes about anyone
page 20

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

" The Atlanta Declaration http://www.lneilsmith.org/AtlantaDeclaration.swf," http://www.lneilsmith.org/atlanta.html presented at WeaponsCon I, Atlanta, Georgia, September 1987.

Martin Lomasney photo

“Never let anyone get anything on you.”

Martin Lomasney (1859–1933) American politician

[Galvin, John T., The West Ender, The Mahatma Called the Shots, and Everyone Knew It: Part 2, 6, 5, December 1990, 9, http://thewestendmuseum.org/documents/1990_west_ender_vol6_no4.pdf]

Pat Condell photo
Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Frederic G. Kenyon photo

“Throughout, the work of Tyndale formed the foundation, and more than anyone else he established the rhythms and furnished much of the language which is familiar to us in the Authorised Version.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter V, The English Bible, p. 49

William Luther Pierce photo
Geert Wilders photo

“In my fight for freedom and against the Islamization of the Netherlands, I will never let anyone silence me. No matter the cost, no matter by whom, whatever the consequences may be.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Statement of Geert Wilders during His Interrogation by the State Police (9 December 2014) http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4940/geert-wilders-police-interrogation
2010s

Stevie Wonder photo
Mitt Romney photo

“In Barack Obama's government-centered society, government spending always increases because, well, why not? There's always someone who's entitled to something more and who's willing to vote for anyone who will give them something more.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Mitt Romney: Wisconsin primary speech http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/mitt-romney-wisconsin-primary-speech-transcript-video/2012/04/03/gIQALzmEuS_blog.html
2012

Chen Shui-bian photo

“No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain.”

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter XII : The Greening Of America, p. 383 ( See also: Vilfredo Pareto)

Narendra Modi photo
Kent Hovind photo
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo

“Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 3

John Waters photo

“I'd never trust anyone who hadn't spent at least one night of his youth in the local jail. The more hell you raise as a teen-ager, the sweeter your memories will be.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Books, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981)

Sören Kierkegaard photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Morrissey photo
Dara Ó Briain photo
Eric Schmidt photo

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Eric Schmidt (1955) software engineer, businessman

CNBC interview, 3 Dec 2009, quoted in Google CEO on Privacy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_383105.html (18 Mar 2010).

Ben Stein photo

“I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Hypocrisy, Democrat Style, The American Spectator, 2 October 2006, 2007-06-20 http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10434,

Gideon Levy photo
Bill Bryson photo
Geert Wilders photo
Boniface Mwangi photo
Werner Erhard photo
John Dolmayan photo
Greg Bear photo

“Believing in anyone more than you believe in yourself causes you to suspend your own judgment, which leads to counter-self-actualization, or self-deactivation.”

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 4 “Iconoclastic means “I Can!”” (p. 106)

C. Rajagopalachari photo
Haruki Murakami photo
John Betjeman photo

“Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy,
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

"In Westminster Abbey" line 1, from Old Lights for New Chancels (1940).
Poetry

John Fante photo
Newton Lee photo

“A modern-day serpent is anyone who disseminates misinformation and disinformation in their verisimilitude.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Variant translations:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility… Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too.
Part I, Book I: A Nice Little Family, Ch. 2 : The Old Buffoon; as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 44
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Cary Grant photo

“Anyone can do well … It’s all out there waiting for you to take. But first you must reach out and get it. You must work for your riches. You cannot expect it to fall into your lap.”

Cary Grant (1904–1986) British-American film and stage actor

Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

“I often pray, though I’m not really sure Anyone’s listening; and I phrase it carefully, just in case He’s literary.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Alex Ferguson photo

“Sometimes we can get too emotional as a club with things that are happening but we are both of a common denominator; we don't want the club to be in anyone else's hands. That is the way that the club stands with that. I support that.”

Alex Ferguson (1941) Scottish footballer and manager

Daily Telegraph (21 November 2004) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2391739/Fergie-warns-off-Glazer.html.

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Michael Savage photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Torquato Tasso photo

“Fortune rarely accompanies anyone to the door.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

This is sometimes said to be by Torquato Tasso, and sometimes to be a quotation from Goethe's verse play Torquato Tasso, but it is from Joseph Jacobs' translation of Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia , maxim no. 59. In the original Spanish: Pocas veces acompaña la dicha a los que salen.
Misattributed

Leo Igwe photo
William Peter Blatty photo
Rosey Grier photo
George V of the United Kingdom photo

“The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear his VC on the scaffold.”

George V of the United Kingdom (1865–1936) King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India

Lord Stamfordham, private secretary to George V, on 26 July 1920. The original Royal Warrant involved an expulsion clause that allowed for a recipient's name to be erased from the official register in certain wholly discreditable circumstances and his pension cancelled. Eight were forfeited between 1861 and 1908. George V strongly opposed the concept of revoking a Victoria Cross, and directed Lord Stamfordham to express this view forcefully in a letter.
About

Shi Nai'an photo

“What excites pleasure in me is the meeting and conversing with old friends. But it is very galling when my friends do not visit me because there is a biting wind, or the roads are muddy through the rain, or perhaps because they are sick. Then I feel isolated. Although I myself do not drink, yet I provide spirits for my friends, […]. In front of my house runs a great river, and there I can sit with my friends in the shadow of the lovely trees. […] When they come they drink and chat, just as they please, but our pleasure is in the conversation and not in the liquor. We do not discuss politics because we are so isolated here that our news is simply composed of rumors, and it would only be a waste of time to talk with untrustworthy information. We also never talk about other people's faults, because in this world nobody is wrong, and we should beware of backbiting. We do not wish to injure anyone, and therefore our conversation is of no consequence to anyone. We discuss human nature about which people know so little because they are too busy to study it.”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Variant translation by Lin Yutang: "When all my friends come together to my house, there are sixteen persons in all, but it is seldom that they all come. But except for rainy or stormy days, it is also seldom that none of them comes. Most of the days, we have six or seven persons in the house, and when they come, they do not immediately begin to think; they would take a sip when they feel like it and stop when they feel like it, for they regard the pleasure as consisting in the conversation, and not in the wine. We do not talk about court politics, not only because it lies outside our proper occupation, but also because at such a distance most of the news is based upon hearsay; hearsay news is mere rumour, and to discuss rumours would be a waste of our saliva. We also do not talk about people's faults, for people have no faults, and we should not malign them. We do not say things to shock people and no one is shocked; on the other hand, we do wish people to understand what we say, but people still don't understand what we say. For such things as we talk about lie in the depths of the human heart, and the people of the world are too busy to hear them." (The Importance of Living, 1937; pp. 218–219)
Preface to Water Margin

Isaac Asimov photo

“The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Three Numbers" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (September 1974); reprinted in More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
General sources

Virginia Satir photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Sam Harris photo

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2
2010s

Yuri Kochiyama photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Franz Kafka photo

“Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one does not see any stars. Anyone who does miracles says: I cannot let go of the earth.”

21 November 1917
Variant translation: Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one cannot see any stars.
The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)

Sam Harris photo
Jeffrey Tucker photo

“For any true man of the right, or anyone who would like to see an end to the welfare-warfare state, Kemp should be the last straw.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

Ayn Rand photo
Sania Mirza photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“I give you bastards four minutes to get outside. They are honoring the greatest second baseman the game has ever known and anyone not out there in four minutes will have to fight me.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Addressing unnamed cards-playing teammates on June 14, 1969, Bill Mazeroski Day https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=P3kfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EVAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7484%2C5218474; as quoted in Reflections on Roberto (1994) by Phil Musick, p. 29
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1969</big>

Václav Havel photo
Marianne Moore photo

“I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Review of Letters of Ezra Pound 1950
Prose

Martin Sheen photo
Bill O'Reilly photo

“Millions of American families are dealing with teenage pregnancy…It is true that some Americans will judge Governor Palin and her family. There's nothing anyone can do about it.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2008-09-03
Sarah Palin and the Chaos Zone
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,416001,00.html

Bernard Lewis photo

“WELT: Has anyone ever been able to invalidate your thesis that Europe will be Islamic at the end of the century?
Lewis: One argument would be that Muslims would soon adopt the demographic pattern of Europe. But I said anyway, provided the current trends of immigration and demography remain, then Europe will become Islamic. To be sure, there has been no major change in these trends.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article211310/Europa-wird-islamisch.html
WELT: Hat bisher jemand Ihre These, wonach Europa am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein werde, entkräften können?
Lewis: Ein Argument wäre, daß Moslems bald das demographische Muster Europas übernehmen. Aber ich sagte ohnehin, sofern die aktuellen Trends der Immigration und Demographie bleiben, dann wird Europa islamisch werden. Freilich gab es bislang keine große Änderung in diesen Trends.
Interviews

Cindy Sheehan photo

“Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not afraid of anything.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

"Sheehan, in Cuba, protests Guantanamo prison," MSNBC, 2007-01-06 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16504209
2007

Florence Nightingale photo

“Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

This is actually a portion of statement by the British nurse Edith Cavell the night before her execution by German forces on charges of espionage.
Misattributed

Richard Dawkins photo
Mitt Romney photo

“If there is anyone worried the last four years are the best we can do, if there is anyone who fears that the American dream is fading away, if there is anyone who wonders whether better jobs and better paychecks are things of the past, I have a clear and unequivocal message: with the right leadership, America will come roaring back.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-11-02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/02/mitt-romneys-closing-argument-advance-excerpts/
Mitt Romney’s closing argument: Advance excerpts
The Washington Post
2012

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Richard Stallman photo

“Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Bill Gates and other communists ", op-ed at ZDNet (15 February 2005) http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=38018
2000s

Nat Hentoff photo
Ian McDiarmid photo
Aldo Capitini photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Jason Aldean photo
Robert A. Dahl photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Marsden Hartley photo
Philip Kapleau photo
Peter D. Schiff photo
Sam Harris photo
Karl Denninger photo

“What makes anyone think [Apple Watch is] going to "disrupt" anything, other than the careers of the people who planned and executed that abortion?”

Karl Denninger American businessman

The iSnicker http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229422 in The Market Ticker (19 September 2014)

Samuel Bowles photo
Alastair Reynolds photo
Dave Matthews photo
Nelson Algren photo
Halldór Laxness photo

“Anyone who doesn't know others doesn't know himself.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Borgi
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Milan Kundera photo

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

pg 56
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

Walter Besant photo
Madonna photo

“No man can have sex with anyone but me and since I don't have that kind of time on my hands, you might as well all be gay!”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

(Joked during Johnjay and Rich interview, 11 April '08).