Quotes about anything (6859 quotes, page 65)

“There is a misconception that because I have worked in the entertainment industry that this would be something I would be familiar with. But even though I had been on my show for I guess six years at that point, and working before that, I have never been part of tabloid culture. I have never been in pop culture to that degree and lived relatively quiet life, even though I focus so much on my job. So that was a really stark difference out of the gate. And I think we were just hit so hard at the beginning with a lot of mistruths that I made the choice to not read anything, positive or negative, it just didn’t make sense. So instead we focused all of our energies on nurturing our relationship.”

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (1981) American former actress and member by marriage of the British royal family

Engagement interview (November 2017)

Reading , Thinking , Sense , Life

“I think for both of us, though, it was really refreshing because given that I didn’t know a lot about him, everything that I have learned about him, I learned through him as opposed to having grown up around different news stories or tabloids, whatever else. Anything I learned about him and his family was what he would share with me, and vice versa. So for both of us it was a very authentic and organic way to get to know each other.”

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (1981) American former actress and member by marriage of the British royal family

Engagement interview (November 2017)

Way , Family , Thinking , Learning

“It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Personality

“Although instances of apparitions shortly after death are by no means uncommon, it is rare to find one in which the departed person has really done anything useful, or succeeded in impressing what he wished upon the friend or relation whom he visited… but little help is usually given by the dead - indeed, as will presently be explained, it is far more common for them to be themselves in need of assistance than to be able to accord it to others… the main bulk of the work which has to be done along these lines falls to the share of those living persons who are able to function consciously on the astral plane.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 4

Dead , Personality , Help , Relation ships

“There are some who cannot make anything much of meditation, and when they try to study they find it very hard. They ought to continue to try both these things, because we must develop all sides of our nature, but most of all they should throw themselves into the work, and do something for their fellow-men.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch.3

Nature , Making love , Study , Men

“The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world... as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below.”

Karl Barth book The Epistle to the Romans

The Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921)

History , Dead , Problem , Christ

“The word spiritual means the active betterment of life for all people, for the most people. Spiritual is anything which brings a man or woman to a higher state of life, whether that is on the physical, the emotional-astral, the mental, or on the spiritual or soul plane. Anything which is towards the betterment of humanity is fundamentally spiritual; it is not only a religious thing. The religious path is only one path. So we have to create structures — political, economic, and social — which are fundamentally spiritual…”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Ageless Wisdom, An Introduction to Humanity's Spiritual Legacy (1996)

Soul , Life , People

“Third World debt — The debt will be written off. There is no possibility of doing anything else. There is no way in which this debt can be recovered.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

World , Way

“You and I are One — Whoever, whatever, wherever you are, tread the divine water of cleanliness which is detachment. I have not come to teach you anything new. Be honest to yourself, sincere to yourself, and be detached. This method is so simple, so sweet, it is free from religions, ideologies, politics. It makes one experience who one is. Fulfill your role, yet be free.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Teachings - The Laws of Life (2005)

Water , Religion , Sincerity , Making love

“I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody … I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”

Tulsi Gabbard (1981) U.S. Representative from Hawaii's 2nd congressional district

Speaking of Chris Butler, creator of the Science of Identity Foundation https://www.chrisbutlerspeaks.com/about-chris-butler, as quoted in "What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker (6 November 2017) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/what-does-tulsi-gabbard-believe
2017

Personality , Gratitude , Hate , People

“I think what informs my songwriting is my empathy with that. Maybe that’s what bothers people. It scares them to go to the edge of the well and look in. But it’s what they like also. And wouldn’t you rather feel the pain than not feel anything?”

Lucinda Williams (1953) American rock, folk, blues, and country music singer, songwriter and musician

On how suicide, sadness and melancholia informs Williams’ songwriting in “Lucinda Williams interview: 'I’ve earned the right to say what I like’” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/10074160/Lucinda-Williams-interview-Ive-earned-the-right-to-say-what-I-like.html in The Telegraph (2013 May 25)

Feeling , Pain , Thinking , People

“I was always into different kinds of music but just by default, I was singing and playing acoustic guitar; I didn’t know how to dance or anything. So it would take some time, over a year, for me to kind of progress into the stuff that I ended up doing later, the more Southern soul, country-rock, whatever-you-want-to-call-it kind of thing.”

Lucinda Williams (1953) American rock, folk, blues, and country music singer, songwriter and musician

On her 1980 album Happy Woman Blues in “Lucinda Williams Looks Back on Every Album She’s Ever Made” https://www.spin.com/2016/02/lucinda-williams-ghosts-of-highway-20-car-wheels-on-a-gravel-road-interview/ in Spin (2016 Feb 25)

Singing , Soul , Time , Country

“The EEC however is not, and never has been, about freedom of trade: it is about, and always has been about, a closed-off internal trading system in Europe. … What the EEC is bent upon has nothing to do with free trade or free anything. It is a naked assertion of the will to power, the will to create a unified state to which instead of our own national organs of representation and government we are all to be subordinated.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Halifax (26 September 1988), quoted in Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), p. 33
1980s

Freedom

“There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries. … Why is there this difference, this divergence, this bifurcation? … it is not due to any difference in intellectual capacity, human ability or insight. It is an absurd notion that the European is intellectually superior to vast millions of the human race in Asia and elsewhere. The subtlety, the insight, the power of reflection and of argument to be found in India and elsewhere are equal to anything which is within our conception or grasp. As for character and human ability, it would be ludicrous, and a confession of total and boorish ignorance, to say that it is difference in those respects which accounts for these differences of experience. In case I be misunderstood, may I say at once that I do not believe that the IQ method of analysing the human race produces useful results for this purpose. I doubt whether many of the characteristics which we regard as typically and transcendentally European are purely intellectual. I think they have in them very much of the moral and very much of the social.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1980/jun/16/international-development-brandt-report#S5CV0986P0_19800616_HOC_323 in the House of Commons (16 June 1980) on the Brandt Report
1980s

Thinking , Country

“Despairingly, sometimes, I seek the comfort of a benign god, Shaarilla. My mind goes out, lying awake at night, searching through black barrenness for something—anything—which will take me to it, warm me, protect me, tell me that there is order in the chaotic tumble of the universe; that it is consistent, this precision of the planets, not simply a brief, bright spark of sanity in an eternity of malevolent anarchy.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Elric sighed and his quiet tones were tinged with hopelessness. “Without some confirmation of the order of things, my only comfort is to accept the anarchy. This way, I can revel in chaos and know, without fear, that we are doomed from the start—that our brief existence is both meaningless and damned. I can accept, then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us. I have weighed the proof, Shaarilla, and must believe that anarchy prevails, in spite of all the laws which seemingly govern our actions, our sorcery, our logic. I see only chaos in the world. If the book we seek tells me otherwise, then I shall gladly believe it. Until then, I will put my trust only in my sword and myself.”
Source: The Elric Cycle, The Weird of the White Wolf (1977), Chapter 1, “A Woman Who Would Risk Grief to Her Soul” (p. 451)

God , Night , Search , Universe

“Everything you have done, my nobles, has been stupid. You have been cruel, greedy, careless of others’ lives and wills. You have been blind, thoughtless, provincial and unimaginative. It seems to me that a government so careless of anything but its own gratification should be at very least replaced.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 3, Chapter 4 “Certain Matters Resolved in Quarzhasaat” (p. 280)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Stupidity

“He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.”

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 2

Hate

“I don’t regret anything. I don’t like to make people feel uncomfortable or bad. But people are very sensitive in this climate. It’s very understandable. I totally understand. I get mad with them. I get it…But no. I would never take back a message of love…I’m sorry that it was misunderstood. But not sorry for saying it because it was from a place of love. And sometimes that happens.”

Erykah Badu (1971) American neo-soul singer

On the pitfalls of expression her opinions in in “'I'm not sorry I said it': Erykah Badu on music, motherhood and wildly unpopular opinions” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/24/erykah-badu-interview in The Guardian (2018 May 24)

Understanding , Making love , Bad luck , People

“He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”

Philip Roth book Everyman

Everyman (2006)

Fear , Feeling

“I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Quoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Coming for Your Hamburgers!, David Remnick, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-coming-for-your-hamburgers (3 March 2019)
Quotes (2019)

Housing , Dreams , Parent

“There is one point more which has been troubling me very much of late and one which I want you to think carefully and that is the question of Hindu-Mohamedan unity. I have devoted most of my time during the last six months to the study of Muslim history and Muslim Law and I am inclined to think, it is neither possible nor practicable. Assuming and admitting the sincerity of the Mohamedan leaders in the Non-cooperation movement, I think their religion provides an effective bar to anything of the kind. You remember the conversation, I reported to you in Calcutta, which I had with Hakim Ajmalkhan and Dr. Kitchlew. There is no finer Mohamedan in Hindustan than Hakimsaheb but can any other Muslim leader override the Quran? I can only hope that my reading of Islamic Law is incorrect, and nothing would relieve me more than to be convinced that it is so. But if it is right then it comes to this that although we can unite against the British we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on British lines, we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on democratic lines. What is then the remedy? I am not afraid of seven crores in Hindustan but I think the seven crores of Hindustan plus the armed hosts of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey will be irresistible. I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders, but what about the injunctions of the Quran and Hadis? The leaders cannot override them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty.”

Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) Indian author and politician

in B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Religion , Study , History , Law

“The Pax Americana has gone the way of the Pax Britannica. … The implication for us in Europe is twofold. First, we shall no longer be able to enjoy the luxury of urging the Americans to put right anything of which we disapprove anywhere in the world and then of criticizing them for the way they do it; and secondly, we shall have to undertake a proper share of the burden of Western defence if American support for the Western Alliance is to be sustained. That share can be underpinned only by a strong and expanding European economy.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Blackpool (12 October 1977), quoted in The Times (13 October 1977), p. 6
Post-Prime Ministerial

World , Support , Way , Strong

“What business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy. And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.”

Smedley D. Butler book War Is a Racket

War is a racket (1935)

Democracy , Business , War , Problem

“If anything I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a church-going, gay, millennial, Red State mayor. I’m also a left-handed Maltese American. I also spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my partner’s father. So am I supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat?”

Pete Buttigieg (1982) American politician

5 January 2017
Pete Buttigieg: meet the Indiana mayor Barack Obama says could be the future of the Democratic Party
The Telegraph
David Lawler
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/31/pete-buttigieg-meet-indiana-mayor-barack-obama-says-could-future/
2017

Thinking , Help

“My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace… A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five. A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party no ifs, ands, or buts… This vulgar grace is indiscriminate compassion. It works without asking anything of us… Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try to find something or someone it cannot cover. Grace is enough… Jesus is enough.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir https://books.google.com/books?id=eFTh3OqjASkC&pg=PA192 (2011), pp. 192–194
2010s

Love , Making love , God

“None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don’t know we can’t do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we’re told not to judge.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: 2000s, The Wisdom of Tenderness: What happens when God's firece mercy transforms our lives (2002), p. 69

Motivation

“When they return to take· over they desire more than anything else to see the integrity of the social institutions of the South unimpaired. They desire to see ·white supremacy maintained. Apove all things they do not desire to see the election laws of the South or the powers of the States in defining the qualifications of electors tampered with. Those boys are fighting to maintain the rights of the States. Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy and the con-trol of our election machinery.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

Congressional Records https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1944-pt1/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1944-pt1-17-1.pdf#page=9 (January 31, 1944)
1940s

Fight , Boy , Law

“We attest that He is the Willer of all things that are, the ruler of all originated phenomena; there does not come into the visible or invisible world anything meager or plenteous, small or great, good or evil, or any advantage or disadvantage, belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or failure, increase or decrease, obedience or disobedience, except by His will. What He wills is, and what He does not, will not; there is not a glance of the eye, nor a stray thought of the heart that is not subject to His will. He is the Creator, the Restorer, the Doer of whatsoever He wills. There is none that rescinds His command, none that supplements His decrees, none that dissuades a servant from disobeying Him, except by His help and mercy, and none has power to obey Him except by His will.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

(2005) Ihyaa ‘Ulum al-Deen. Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, p. 107.

Success , Help , Heart , Knowledge

“Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 327)

World , Dreams , Democracy , Country

“I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 7 “The Same Kind”, Section 2 (p. 140)

God , Learning , Universe , Age

“If anything, Theory of the Subject is a work of Marxist philosophy that contains all of the contradictions reached by Marxism-Leninism, while being, at the same time, aware that these contradictions are contradictions insofar as they point to the necessity of a new rupture in revolutionary science.”

J. Moufawad-Paul Canadian academic and writer

Source: Continuity and Rupture:Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (2016), Chapter one

Science , Time

“If this referendum is about anything it is about what kind of Britain we are and what kind of Britain we aspire to become. We should be a leader in Europe, not simply a member. We should not be fully out and we should not be half out. We should be fully in. We should recognise that the world has changed since the first referendum and we should be advocates for cooperation in an inter-dependent world.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Gordon Brown says quitting EU would not be British https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36263256 BBC News (11 May 2016)
Post premiership

World , Dependency , Change

“I admit the charge, but deny that nature, race, or color has anything to do with the fact. Any other race, with the same antecedents and the same conditions, would show a similar thieving propensity. The American people have this lesson to learn, that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property would be safe… While I hold now, as I held years ago, that the South is the natural home of the colored race, and that there must the destiny of that race be mainly worked out, I still believe that means can be and ought to be adopted, to assist in the emigration of such of their number as may wish to change their residence to parts of the country, where their civil and political rights are better protected than at present they can be at the South… The Republican party is not perfect; it is cautious even to the point of timidity; but it is the best friend we have.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, Speech on the Anniversary of Emancipation (1886)

Home , Justice , Country , Personality

“I hold that the Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government. Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in a man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

As quoted in Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July https://books.google.com/books?id=-m2WBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT106&lpg=PT106&dq=%22scaffolding+to+the+magnificent+structure%22+douglass&source=bl&ots=KT4-pHUo5-&sig=ACfU3U21MIZj_niQo7pIGSxeO5vhEkXq4w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim6fvM3I3iAhVqiOAKHWIqDK8Q6AEwB3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22scaffolding%20to%20the%20magnificent%20structure%22%20douglass&f=false
1860s, Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)

Relation ships

“It means that until 12 April, anything is possible: a deal, a long extension if the United Kingdom decided to rethink its strategy, or revoking Article 50, which is a prerogative of the UK government. The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. As the EU, we are prepared for the worst, but hope for the best. As you know, hope dies last.”

Donald Tusk (1957) Polish politician, current President of the European Council

Brexit's fate 'is in British hands', says Donald Tusk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47672136 BBC News (22 March 2019)
2011, 2019

Hope , Fate

“She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U. S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set.”

Joseph Heller book Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000)

Personality , God

“What was the most important thing for (Mandela) was his release from prison and nothing else. He cherished that freedom more than anything else and forgot why he was put in jail.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

As quoted in "WATCH: 'Fascinating' video of Mugabe talking 'non-racialism' like Mandela goes viral on social media" https://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/watch-fascinating-video-of-mugabe-talking-non-racialism-like-mandela-20170916 (16 September 2017), News24, South Africa
2010s

Freedom

“Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life, we were banging on about Europe. As they worried about standards in thousands of secondary schools, we obsessed about a handful of more grammar schools. As rising expectations demanded a better NHS for everyone, we put our faith in opt-out for a few. While people wanted more than anything stability and low mortgage rates, the first thing we talked about was tax cuts.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth (1 October 2006), quoted in The Times (2 October 2006), p. 6
2000s, 2006

School , Family , Faith , People

“Can we suppose anything more hateful or even more execrable to God than this fiction of asking the pardon of sins, while he who asks at the very time either thinks that he is not a sinner, or, at least, is not thinking that he is a sinner; in other words, a fiction by which God is plainly held in derision?”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 6
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God , Thinking , Time , Hate

“Ernst Roehm was a thug. He was a brutish and zealous believer in National Socialism. If anything, he was more radical than Hitler. He believed in the elimination of anyone connected with the old order, businessmen, office holders of any kind. He became the leader of the SA, the Storm Troopers, whose terror tactics had helped make Hitler the leader of Germany.”

Ernst Röhm (1887–1934) German Nazi and military officer

Vance Stewart, "Three Against One," 2002

Making love , Help

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

The New York Review of Books interview with the French writer Roger Errera (1978)

History , Dependency , People , Nature

“The treatment of the South Tirolese by the Italians, even before the advent of Fascism worse than anything known until then in modern times in any part of Western or Central Europe, has made the population more unwilling than ever to endure it further.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Protesting against the Allies' decision to hand South Tyrol back to Italy; letter to The Times (22 December 1945), p. 5
1940s–1950s

Time , Parting

“It Was Hank Aaron who hung that Dr. Strangeglove tag on me. I told him, to his face, that he would never amount to anything.”

Dick Stuart (1932–2002) American baseball player

Clearly confusing "Strangeglove" with "Stone Fingers" (see below); as quoted in "A Sad Story: Dick Stuart's Bat Was Solid; So Was His Glove" by Milt Dunnell, in The Toronto Star (June 1, 1987), p. B1

“This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

Christopher Hitchens, Mel Gibson Isn't Just an Angry Narcissist: His tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of right-wing Catholic ideology., Slate, July. 19, 2010

“First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows-When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), p. 30

Sense , Time

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist see him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of himself. Man simply is.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), p. 28

World , God , Making love , Nature

“As interpolation instead of interpretation was not then so common or so honourable as at present, I believed that a part of my work was well done. How was I to expect that, because I ascribed piety to Spinoza, I would myself be taken for a Spinozist? Yet I had never defended his system, and anything philosophic that was in my book was manifestly inconsistent with the characteristics of his views and had quite a different basis than the unity of substance.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) [original in German]
S - Z

Books , Parting

“For many years I did not dare look into a Latin author or at anything which evoked an image of Italy. If this happened by chance, I suffered agonies. Herder often used to say mockingly that I had learned all my Latin from Spinoza, for that was the only Latin book he had ever seen me reading. He did not realize how carefully I had to guard myself against the classics, and that it was sheer anxiety which drove me to take refuge in the abstractions of Spinoza.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: Schon einige Jahre her durft' ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute. Geschah es zufällig, so erduldete ich die entsetzlichsten Schmerzen. Herder spottete oft über mich, daß ich all mein Latein aus dem Spinoza lerne, denn er hatte bemerkt, daß dies das einzige lateinische Buch war, das ich las; er wußte aber nicht, wie sehr ich mich vor den Alten hüten mußte, wie ich mich in jene abstrusen Allgemeinheiten nur ängstlich flüchtete.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, 1786–88. Translated from the German by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)
G - L, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Chance , Reading , Suffering , Learning

“I have had, for my entire life, an extraordinary esteem for the person and for the thinking of that great philosopher. But I do not believe that attitude gives me the right to say anything publically about him, for the good reason that I would have nothing to say that has not been said by others.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Siegfried Hessing. As quoted in António Damásio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003)
A - F

Personality , Thinking , Life

“So far as the Negroes were concerned, their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified, and to give them anything less than this was an economic farce.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book Black Reconstruction

Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 602

Parting

“What! You would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book 5 Section 11
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)

People

“Despite countless hours of practice, dozens of auditions, many artistic disputes, seven demo CDs, and two radical changes in hairstyle, Arrival never arrived. It wasn’t that they were bad; it was just that, as they reluctantly came to understand, they really weren’t anything special. They were competent. The problem was, there were competent bands everywhere. Competence wasn’t the key to stardom; you needed something else. Whatever it was, Arrival didn’t have it.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Novels, Tricky Business (2002), Chapter 3

Problem , Bad luck , Understanding , Change

“That which the God devoted man may not do for any consideration, is indeed also outwardly forbidden in the Perfect State; but he has already cast it from him in obedience to the Will of God, without regard to any outward prohibition. That which alone this God-devoted man loves and desires to do, is indeed outwardly commanded in this Perfect State; but he has already done it in obedience to the Will of God. If, then, this religious frame of mind is to exist in the State, and yet never to come into collision with it, it is absolutely necessary that the State should at all times keep pace with the development of the religious sense among its Citizens, so that it shall never command anything which True Religion forbids, or forbid anything which she enjoins. In such a state of things, the well-known principle, that we must obey God rather than man, could never come into application; for in that case man would only command what God also commanded, and there would remain to the willing servant only the choice whether he would pay his obedience to the command of human power, or to the Will of God, which he loves before all things else. From this perfect Freedom and superiority which Religion possesses over the State, arises the duty of both to keep themselves absolutely separate, and to cast off all immediate dependence on each other.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 197

God , Religion , Time , Dependency

“There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images — pictures — only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 60
The Vocation of Man (1800), Knowledge

Past , Dreams , Reality , World

“As long as you want to keep playing whack-a-mole from hell, it is my solemn promise that I will keep picking up the metaphorical hammer to slam you back down and remind you that you have not yet done anything to earn our forgiveness. So take your millions of dollars and pay a therapist to care about how tough it’s been to get caught being an abuser because honestly, I don’t give a shit.”

Samantha Bee (1969) Canadian comedic actress and author

Full Frontal, May 9, 2018, as quoted in "Samantha Bee Checks in With #MeToo, This Time With Zero F***s Left to Give for These Men" https://www.themarysue.com/samantha-bee-schneiderman-eff-off/, by Vivian Kane, The Mary Sue, May 10th, 2018

Forgiveness , Hell

“Ibn Warraq is the pen-name of the author whose parents emigrated from India to Pakistan as a result of the Partition. He was brought up in Pakistan, which was supposed to be an Islamic Republic. His experience revealed to him that the Muslims of India had been cheated in the name of Islam and its projected principles of equality, free will and democracy. As he grew up, he noticed that Islam had become an effective tool of convenient morality and achieving political goals; a religious or secular leader could prove anything from the Koran and Hadith to suit his purpose, yet every faithful believes that there is no contradiction in the verses of the Koran!”

Ibn Warraq (1946) Pakistani writer

Anwar Shaikh quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm

Democracy , Faith , Parent , Cheating

“THE COURT:... Mr. Dellinger, do you care to say anything? Only in respect to punishment.”

Dave Dellinger (1915–2004) American activist

'MR. DELLINGER: Yes . . . and I hope you will do me the courtesy not to interrupt me while I am talking.'
THE COURT: I won't interrupt you as long as you are respectful.
'MR. DELLINGER: Well. I will talk about the facts and the facts don't always encourage false respect.'
United States of America vs. David T. Dellinger et al.

“I would give anything if I could sing like George Jones.”

George Jones (1931–2013) American musician, singer and songwriter

Waylon Jennings, The True Genius of George Jones http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/26/george_jones_died_the_country_music_legend_was_a_genius_video.html.

Singing

“I do not expect any problems to arise because we do not expect Mr. Chandra Shekhar to do anything that is inconsistent with Congress ideology and policies.”

Chandra Shekhar (1927–2007) Indian politician

Vithal Gadgil in: Sanjoy Hazarika "Rival of Singh Becomes India Premier"

After extending support to Shekahr to form the government.

Problem

“This was certainly at the root of my intense dislike of machinery, and my firm determination never to work in an office or anything of that nature.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

His aversion for his father’s factories about which he was terrified. He was guided in all things by his mother. His senses were simulated by the floral, ornamental opulence of her world. P.11
Christian Dior: The Man who Made the World Look New

Nature

“Therefore, come to our aid you who alone are able. For this rivalry exists for sake of you, whom alone they revere in everything that all seem to worship. For each one desires in all that he seems to desire only the good which you are; no one is seeking with all his intellectual searching for anything else than the truth which you are. For what does the living seek except to live? What does the existing seek except to exist?”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Truth , Search

“Ramnath Goenka was a Man of many parts, freedom fighter, Gandhian Worker, politician, merchant, industrialist and newspaper magnate. But more than anything else he was an indomitable warrior for the Freedom Of the Press, whose frontiers he fearlessly defended and pushed, Often at enormous cost to himself. His mission as a newspaper publisher was to empower the citizen, uphold his right to know, and to make all those in power and authority accountable To the people a mission that he carried out with unflagging, if sometimes excessive zeal.”

Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician

By B. G. Verghese in [B. G. Verghese, Warrior of the Fourth Estate: Ramnath Goenka of the Express, http://books.google.com/books?id=jPZkAAAAMAAJ, 2005, Viking, 978-0-670-05842-6]

Making love , People , Parting , Freedom

“I don’t think, Mr. Palkhiwala, you can add anything more to what Mr. Nariman has so well presented.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

These were some of the early memories in the Bombay Bar which Mr Nariman still recalls and cherish.
When he had appeared in case on the brief of Mr. Palkhiwala.
Fali S. Nariman, ‘Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography

Thinking

“Isn’t there anything you can do about the predator?”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Carmody asked.
“Nothing. Nor would I if I could. Predation is a necessary circumstance. Even the Gods are eventually eaten by Fate. You will not be an exception to the universal rule.”

Chapter 21 (p. 136)
Dimension of Miracles (1968)

“Everyone in the bus service liked him, back in those days. He used to move easily with everyone. But he was also a very short-tempered man. He would not get violent or anything like that when he lost his cool, but he never hesitated to shout at people if he felt they were in the wrong. Basically, he was a serious-minded type of chap, but he could also be the life and soul of a party, keeping everyone laughing with his jokes.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

Raja Bahadur, his friend
You can see God in him at times (22 December 1999)

Soul , Life , People

“I THINK OF INTERSCOPE AND ALL THESE LABELS AS THE BIGGEST FUCKING IDIOTS ON THE PLANET. And print that in capitals, because they can’t do anything to me.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

Reported in Jay Babcock, " JOSHUA HOMME: People say [record] labels are evil. No, they’re just lame. http://www.arthurmag.com/2007/12/04/josh-homme-people-say-labels-are-evil-no-theyre-just-lame/", Arthur Magazine (December 4, 2007).

Thinking

“All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity… The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Passion , Painting , Understanding , Art

“Mengistu does not understand the meaning of self-determination, either historically or in the abstract. He cannot conceive of a nation as anything but an absolute centralized authority, totalitarianism, for his rule is nothing less than that now.”

Mengistu Haile Mariam (1937) Former dictator of Ethiopia

Dawit Wolde Giorgis (1989) Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, The Red Sea Press Inc., p. 112
About Mengistu

Self-confidence , Understanding

“You learning anything from this?”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Tyrell asked.
Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”
Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 3 (p. 36)

Learning

“What United have got that Chelsea haven’t is Paul Scholes. I think he is different to anything else in English football.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://thepeoplesperson.com/2013/11/05/what-made-paul-scholes-so-special-30928/
Kevin Keegan

Football , Thinking

“If the potential of every number is in the monad, then the monad would be intelligible number in the strict sense, since it is not yet manifesting anything actual, but everything conceptually together in it.”

Iamblichus (240–320) Syrian philosopher

On the Monad
The Theology of Arithmetic

Sense , Intelligence

“Whenever single people complain about anything, I really want them to shut the fuck up. First of all, if you’re single, your life has no consequence on the earth. Even if you’re helping people aggressively, which you’re fucking not, nobody gives a shit what happens to you. You can die, and it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Your mother will cry or whatever, but otherwise, nobody gives a shit.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/

Help , Life , Cry , People

“The Greatest Generation gets too much credit. Those World War II guys, if they had all the shit we have today, they’d be assholes too. It’s just circumstantial. It’s what you’re called on to do that makes you great. We haven’t been called on to do anything but buy shit and get fat.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/louis-ck-starvation-can-be-character-building

World , War , Guy , Making love

“I cannot think of a single answer that I made in the years that I argued before the Court while Justice White sat on it that seemed to satisfy him. While I won a number of cases that I argued before him, and he voted for my side in most of them, I never had the sense that anything I said pleased him. White, a former All-American running back (whose much-repeated college nickname, Whizzer, was one that appalled him), was no fan of press claims for broad First Amendment protection. He invariably asked questions that were both pointed and powerful.”

Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player

Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, (Viking Press, 2005), p. 71.

Sense , Thinking , Justice , Question

“You think I am crazy. You will try to give me morphine. Get out of here; you are sacked. Get that medical uniform off. Go home and act as if you had never had anything to do with me.”

Theodor Morell (1886–1948) Personal physician to Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler, to Morell, in the final days of the war.

Home , Thinking

“Most of the girls who dated us back then were these innocent chicks whose lives were changed forever after one of us came into it for however long it lasted. We were like a vacuum back then that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside that way. Some people died, not because of anything we did, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.”

Slash (musician) book Slash

Source: Slash (2007) by Anthony Bozza & Mason Segal,, p. 256.

Girl , People , Way , Life

“Von dem Bach is so clever he can do anything, get around anything.”

Erich von dem Bach (1899–1972) German politician and SS functionary

Adolf Hitler, as quoted in The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (1978) by Thomas D. Parrish and Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, p. 45

“All of us started out normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives we got lost. Though we are here at this Clinic trying to find our way back, we all know that most of us will never get there. Things like the fight allow us to dream, and take us away from here, and allow us to imagine what the normal World must be like and how normal people must live in it.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

page 332
A Million Little Pieces (2003)

Imagination , Dreams , People , Fight

“In the face of surviving long enough to survive in the long term, there is no goal that comes to mind that means anything to me. I could write Survive, but I would rather hold that word in my heart than write it on some fucking board.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

page 199
A Million Little Pieces (2003)

Heart

“The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

Question , Freedom , Falseness , Mathematics

“Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure. If there is a failure of expectations, that is, if the messages that we receive are not the same as those we expected, we can make three possible inferences.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 42

Making love , Failure , Learning , Success

“Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Cover and title of Cerebus #65, August 1984, collected in Church & State I, p. 7 and 273
Usually quoted with "Anything" unspaced (as in the title p. 7), sometimes quoted spaced (as in the art p. 273, as "Any thing done for the first time unleashes a demon.") because the cover art http://www.comics.org/issue/175338/ piles "Any" and "thing" (though they are joined, the leg of the "y" being also the bar of the "t").
Compare to a quote misattributed to Emily Dickinson: "Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon." (origin and date unknown, also attributed to Dave Sim)
Church & State volume I (1987)

Time

“Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.
"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."
Mr. Rochester and Jane (Ch. 23)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Thinking

“The greatest player of the past 20 years? It has to be Zidane. He had everything. You never needed to tell him anything as he did it all by himself and knew what was expected.”

Zinedine Zidane (1972) French association football player and manager

Marcello Lippi, September 2011 http://www.espnstar.com/football/serie-a/news/detail/item683056/%22Zidane-is-greatest-football-player%22/

Past

“He has become the most influential player in England, bar none. Not that Vieira lacks anything, but Gerrard does more.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United FC ( Source http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/liverpool/4647845.stm)

“Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world? With just the leather of my sandals, it is as if the whole world were covered. Likewise, I am unable to restrain external phenomena, but I shall restrain my own mind. What need is there to restrain anything else?”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

§ 5.13
Bodhicaryavatara, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

World

“The greatest comet of British politics in the twentieth century…an orator of the highest rank. He produced, almost unaided, a programme of economic reconstruction which surpassed anything offered by Lloyd George or, in the United States, by F. D. Roosevelt…He has continued fertile in ideas…A superb political thinker, the best of our age.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

A. J. P. Taylor

Idea , Age

“I have throughout introduced the Integral Calculus in connexion with the Differential Calculus. …Is it always proper to learn every branch of a direct subject before anything connected with the inverse relation is considered? If so why are not multiplication and involution in arithmetic made to follow addition and precede subtraction?”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

The portion of the Integral Calculus, which properly belongs to any given portion of the Differential Calculus increases its power a hundred-fold...
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Relation ships , Learning

“My proof that homosexuality is not a choice? A question for my straight male readers: Is there anything I could do or say or write that would convince you to willingly, happily, eagerly, anxiously, deliriously, lustfully put my dick in your mouth and leave it there until I had an orgasm? I rest my case.”

Dan Savage book Skipping Towards Gomorrah

Source: Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002), p. 79

Question

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.
“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Personality , Feeling , Nature

“His poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.”

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) Polish writer

A.Alvarez, The New York Review of Books (1985-07-18).

“Aw:North America|Anything in life is possible and YOU make it happen!”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

Jack LaLanne: Live young forever, Robert Kennedy Publishing, Mississauga 2009, P. 15
LaLanne's reply when asked for the best advice he'd ever received, reported in the Denver Post (28 December 2003)

Life , Making love

“To take such generous contracts and screw them up so dramatically must suggest that these are the most probably the worst business people ever assembled in one place to run anything. … the civil servants were taken to the cleaners and on the face of it you still end up with a £750 million overspend based on your mismanagement of them. I think they should be sacked, hung drawn and quartered, thrown out of the country and the whole thing (the London Underground) returned to public ownership. I saw that they (Metronet management) wanted to talk to the Mayor about this — wasting their breath sunshine!”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

they can go out and raise the money amongst their shareholders who came here to get their snout in the trough — they screwed it up; they are not getting any of our money!
Remarks made regarding the management of Metronet and the PPP of the London Underground during a Mayor's press conference (13 March 2007)

Business , Thinking , People , Country

“Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'
Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971).

“I was suspicious for several reasons… after all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93-years-old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything.”

Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) German Nazi leader

Lt. Col. Eugene K. Bird on the death of Hess, to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur reporter, as quoted in "Former governor of Spandau Prison dies in Berlin" in Expatica (7 November 2005)

“He also never drove anywhere at anything less than an absolutely flat-out pace, be it on the road or the track…”

Gilles Villeneuve (1950–1982) Canadian racecar driver

Harvey Postlethwaite - Henry, pg. 25

“Oh, I would be honoured to even be compared to Roger. He has such an unbelievable talent, and is capable of anything. Roger could be the greatest tennis player of all time.”

Roger Federer (1981) Swiss tennis player

Rod Laver, winner of 11 Grand Slams, considered by some the greatest player to ever play the game of tennis. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/sport/2004/11/12/stfedr12.xml

Time