Quotes about door
page 17

Iltutmish photo
Paddy Ashdown photo

“My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.”

Paddy Ashdown (1941–2018) British politician and diplomat

As quoted in "Farewell, Sarajevo" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/02/warcrimes.politics (1 November 2005), The Guardian

China Miéville photo
Yvette Cooper photo
Benjamin Peirce photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Nigel Farage photo

“Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Nigel Farage attacked over Romanians 'slur' https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-27459923 BBC News (18 May 2014)
2014

Han Kuo-yu photo

“Taiwan is one step away from becoming like North Korea: completely locked out of things. We need to break free from this situation. If there is no threat to national security, we need to open the doors wide open.”

Han Kuo-yu (1957) Taiwanese political figure

Han Kuo-yu (2019) cited in " Taiwan a ‘step away’ from being like North Korea: Han http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2019/10/10/2003723698" on Taipei Times, 10 October 2019.
2019

William Laud photo

“Ever since I came in place, I laboured nothing more, than that the external public worship of God (too much slighted in most parts of this kingdom) might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion, that unity cannot long continue in the Church, where uniformity is shut out at the church door.”

William Laud (1573–1645) Archbishop of Canterbury

Speech at his trial (12 March 1644), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume IV: History of Troubles and Trial (1847), p. 60

Alice A. Bailey photo
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez photo
Gerard Batten photo

“We are determined to protect our freedom of speech and the right to speak our minds without fear of the politically correct thought-police knocking on our doors.”

Gerard Batten (1954) British politician

UKIP aiming to be 'radical, populist' party - Gerard Batten https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45593648 BBC News (21 September 2018)
2018

Louis Farrakhan photo

“The Jews have control over those agencies of government. When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.”

Louis Farrakhan (1933) leader of the Nation of Islam

How the rise of conspiracy theory politics emboldens anti-Semitism https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/10/31/18034256/anti-semitism-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-prejudice-right Vox.com', (February 2018)

Dietrich von Choltitz photo

“Gentlemen, you are the leaders of the best soldiers in the world. I will give you five or six of my own men; we will cover your back with sustained barrage fire to protect you while you cross the rue de Rivoli. All you need to do is force open a door to fight your way to the tapestry.”

Dietrich von Choltitz (1894–1966) German general

To two SS-Manns about retrieving the Bayeux Tapestry, 21 August 1944
Edsel, Robert M. (2013-07-01). The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History https://books.google.pl/books?id=hBoh9SAKOVgC&pg=PT91&lpg=PT91&source=bl&ots=Rp0jmiHzUw&sig=j149WGdxMIHBFT-B5RvkcOpkJzc&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjylKfG4tTfAhUP3qQKHeRjCA8Q6AEwBHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. Random House. ISBN 9781448183159

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Edward Bellamy photo
Michael Swanwick photo

“Out of doors on a moonless night?”

Mette sneered. “Only fools, footpads, and astrologers stray where there is no light.”
Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 4, “Flight” (p. 57)

K. R. Narayanan photo

“MY husband and I were on a train journey and at a wayside station I asked him to get me a cup of tea. When he returned, just as the train was steaming out, I saw him standing at the door of the compartment, teacup in one hand, trying busily to get rid of his w:Flip-flops}chappal. `What are you doing?”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

I asked. "Oh, nothing. I accidentally dropped one of the pair at the platform... I can't get it back... What is the use of my keeping one when the man who finds the first will need both?
His wife Usha Narayanan
A remarkable life-story

Jeff Buckley photo
Bill Bailey photo

“Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to.
Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)

Bill Bryson photo

“A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

“Attendants, will you please close and lock the doors?”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor
Richard Feynman photo
Margaret Cho photo
Kate Bush photo

“My door was never locked,
Until one day a trigger come cocking.
(But now I've started learning how,)
I keep it shut.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Dreaming (1982)

Thurgood Marshall photo
André Aciman photo

“There may be open doors before me, but I'm always drawn to the one that's locked.”

Book: Cometan, the Omnidoxy

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
John Milton photo
Dylan Moran photo
Wajid Ali Shah photo

“Shedding tears we spend the night in this deepening dark,
Our day is but a long struggle against an uphill path,
Not a single moment goes when we don't bewail our lot,
Lo! we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
We wish you well, O friends, leave you to His care,
And entrust our Qaiser Bagh to the blowing air,
While we give our tender heart to terror and despair.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I am betrayed by my friends, whom should I excuse?
Except God the gracious, I have no refuge,
I can't escape exile, under any excuse.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on the doors and wells,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I have been told this much too, ah! the scourage of time!
The servant calls his master 'mad,' a travesty of the mind.
As for me, I cannoy help, but rot in alien climes.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are gong afar!
This is the cause of my regret, to whom should I complain?
What wondrous goods of mine are subjected to disdain,
My exile has raised a storm in the whole domain.
Lo we cast a lingering look on the doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
You cannot help but suffer, O heart, the sharp strings of grief,
They didn't spare even the things essential for the mourning meets,
In the scorching summer heat, I've no cover or sheet.
Akhtar now departs from all his friends and mates,
There is little time or need to dwell upon my fate,
Save, O God, my countrymen from the dangers lying in wait!
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!”

Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887) Nawab of Awadh

Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry, p. 63-67
Poetry

Immanuel Kant photo
William Cobbett photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Ken Thompson photo

“The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358210/reflections.pdf, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

George Santayana photo

“I was still “at the church door.””

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic.

p. 169
Persons and Places (1944)

Koenraad Elst photo

“The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins (2019)

Kazi Nazrul Islam photo

“O heart, Ramadan has come to an end,
and the happy Eid knocks at the door for all,
Come, today give yourself away wholeheartedly,
heed the divine call.”

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976) Bengali poet

"Eid, At The End Of Fasting Of Ramadan", as translated by Mohammad Omar Farooq

Ho Chi Minh photo
Ronnie James Dio photo
David Sedaris photo
Narendra Modi photo

“On March 22, at 5 pm stand on your doors and windows for 5 minutes and clap, ring a bell to salute people who are serving the nation tirelessly.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2020
Source: Address to the Nation on Coronavirus pandemic on 19 March 2020 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-modi-speech-on-coronavirus-thank-corona-warriors-1657591-2020-03-19

Omar Khayyám photo

“The Vine had struck a fibre: which about
If clings my being — let the Dervish flout;
Of my Base metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)

Ben Croshaw photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Lily Allen photo
Warren Farrell photo

“With confidentiality as the key, men’s groups open the door to men opening their hearts.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 286

Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Enoch Powell photo

“So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!'”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

… The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment—it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability—I have not feared to give: it is—to use words I used two years and a half ago—that 'the people of England will not endure it'.
Source: Speech to the Carshalton and Banstead Young Conservatives at Carshalton Hall (15 February 1971), from Still to Decide (1972), pp. 202-203

Annie Besant photo
Thuraya AlArrayed photo

“Every day
When the enchanted times child shares my solitude
She lifts me with fatal calmness
Out of the orbit of the four seasons
Through the worn out doors
Searching for the fifth Season
Where dreams should have poured.”

Thuraya AlArrayed (1948) Saudi poet and writer

The Doors ;the Game of Times
Source: Patty Paine, ‎Jeff Lodge, ‎Samia Touati (2011). Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry. p. 255

Carly Simon photo

“I pretended I was Cat Stevens. I started out with very Cat Stevensy chords, very abrupt. I was so stuck in the moment of being fearful so as a lesson to myself I said: ‘but we can never know about the days to come’. I didn’t know when the door-bell was going to ring. I liked that. It was all of a sudden a quarter to eight and I had written the whole song.”

Carly Simon (1943) American singer-songwriter, musician and author

On her song “Anticipation” in “Carly Simon explains ‘Anticipation’ was about Cat Stevens” http://www.music-news.com/news/Underground/101225/Carly-Simon-explains-Anticipation-was-about-Cat-Stevens in Music-News.com (31 Oct 2016)

Elizabeth Martinez photo
John Cooper Clarke photo

“If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, we will turn the page on hate and close the door on discrimination by enforcing our federal civil rights laws.”

Kristen Clarke American lawyer

8 January 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/08/an-all-star-lineup-doj/

Jair Bolsonaro photo

“We’re all migrants in Brazil, but we can’t fling our doors open wide for [everybody] to just come. [...] To come here and marry 11-year-old children... […] We can’t tolerate certain types of people coming to Brazil and disrespecting our culture and our religion,”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

During a broadcast on social media on 12 December 2018. Bolsonaro says Brazil may “quit” Paris Agreement http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2018-12/bolsonaro-says-brazil-may-quit-paris-agreement. Agência Brasil (13 December 2019).
2018

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Daniel Kash photo
John Bosco photo
John Barrymore photo
Confucius photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“The doors of wisdom are never shut.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Kelly Marie Tran photo

“I believe if you can have an open dialogue about anything, whether it's a book or a movie or TV show, it's this door that suddenly opens your mind to new ideas.”

Kelly Marie Tran (1989) American actress

As quoted in "Star Wars Breakout Kelly Marie Tran on The Last Jedi and Kylo Ren’s Shirtless Scene" in Vulture (20 December 2017) https://www.vulture.com/2017/12/kelly-marie-tran-on-the-last-jedi-and-shirtless-kylo-ren.html

Regina Spektor photo

“No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door
And they say "We've got some bad news, sir."”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Far (2009)

Paulo Coelho photo
Kim Dae-jung photo

“I believe democracy is the foundation of a healthy economy. Without genuine democracy you cannot have a genuine market economy. And, under the market economy, one must fully open doors to allow free trade and investment.”

Kim Dae-jung (1924–2009) South Korean politician

"Interview: President Kim Dae Jung" in TIME Asia http://www.cnn.com/ASIANOW/time/magazine/99/0913/interview.html (13 September 1999)

Diane Ackerman photo
Armen Sarkissian photo

“Education opens the way to a new life and a new world. Be brave and confident. Open all doors through knowledge, open with your willpower and the impulse of your hearts, diligence, helping each other, trusting each other, learning from each other.”

Armen Sarkissian (1953) 4th President of Armenia, Member of the Global Leadership Foundation, one of the directors of Eurasia House, phy…

"Congratulations on the Knowledge and Schooling Day" https://www.president.am/en/statements-and-messages/item/2021/09/01/President-Armen-Sarkissians-congratulatory-message-on-the-occasion-of-Knowledge-and-Schooling-Day-/ (1 September 2021)

Simone Biles photo

“I am going back home in one piece, which I was a little bit nervous about. It's not how I wanted it to go, but I think we've opened bigger doors and bigger conversations.”

Simone Biles (1997) American gymnast

"Olympics 2021 - Simone Biles discusses her mental health, challenges after winning bronze on beam" in ESPN (3 August 2021) https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/31953744/olympics-2021-simone-biles-explains-challenges-balance-beam-final

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Alfred Noyes photo
Paulo Coelho photo

“Don’t give up. Remember, it’s always the last key on the keyring that opens the door.”

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Love has always passed me by

Lev Shestov photo

“There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement.””

Lev Shestov (1866–1938) Russian theologian

Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10
Source: In Job's Balances: on the sources of the eternal truths, The Conquest of the Self-Evident; Dostoievsky’s Philosophy

W. S. Gilbert photo

“When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney's firm.
I cleaned the wndows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

H.M.S. Pinafore (1878)
Source: 1878, HMS Pinafore, act 2, also quoted in Dictionary of Quotations, p. 353-354 (2005)

Bo Xilai photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Milan Stipić photo
Desmond Tutu photo
Edgar Guest photo
Gilbert O'Sullivan photo
Gilbert O'Sullivan photo
Edgar Guest photo
Simu Liu photo

“Even when I was a struggling actor, I was writing scripts, which were terrible, but I was fueled by a belief that I had to create the door. The right door wasn’t always going to open for me. Sometimes I was going to have to just crash through it or build one where there was no door before.”

Simu Liu (1989) Chinese-born Canadian actor

Source: "‘Shang-Chi’ Star Simu Liu on “Betrayal” of ‘Kim’s Convenience’ Cancellation" in The Hollywood Reporter (21 May 2021) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/shang-chi-star-simu-liu-1234955154/