Quotes about nobody
page 9

Caldwell Esselstyn photo
Alan Keyes photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Izaak Walton photo
Kin Hubbard photo

“Nobody can be as agreeable as an uninvited guest.”

Kin Hubbard (1868–1930) cartoonist

As quoted in The Book of Unusual Quotations (1957) by Rudolf Franz Flesch, p. 8.

George Holyoake photo

“This was the angerless philosophy of Owen, which inspired him with a forbearance that never failed him, and gave him that regnant manner which charmed all who met him. We shall see what his doctrine of environment has done for society, if we notice what it began to do in his day, and what it has done since.
Men perished by battle, by tempest, by pestilence, Faith might comfort, but it did not save them. In every town, nests of pestilence co-existed with the churches, who were concerned alone with worship. Disease was unchecked by devotion. Then Owen asked, "Might not safety come by improved material condition?" As the prayer of hope brought no reply, as the scream of agony, if heard, was unanswered, as the priest, with the holiest intent, brought no deliverance, it seemed prudent to try the philosopher and the physician.
Then Corn Laws were repealed, because prayers fed nobody. Then parks were multiplied because fresh air was found to be a condition of health. Alleys and courts, were begun to be abolished-since deadly diseases were bred there. Streets were widened, that towns might be ventilated. Hours of labour were shortened, since exhaustion means liability to epidemic contagion. Recreation was encouraged, as change and rest mean life and strength. Temperance — thought of as self-denial — was found to be a necessity, as excess of any kind in diet, or labour, or pleasure means premature death. Those who took dwellings began to look, not only to drainage and ventilation, but to the ways of their near neighbours, as the most pious family may poison the air you breathe unless they have sanitary habits.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Memorial dedication (1902)

Phil Brooks photo

“I really hope that the symbolism isn't lost on you four Superstars in the chamber right now, because it's killing me. Here's four extremely weak individuals that, every day, are locked inside a prison of addiction, like most of these people here today; and now, the four of you are locked inside the Elimination Chamber with me. And be sure, it's not me locked in here with you — it's you locked in here with me. And tomorrow morning, when you're nursing the pain and the wounds that this chamber and myself have caused you, I want you to remember that when your pod door opens and you came out and I defeated you, don't think of it as failure. Think of it as me saving you. [Standing over Rey Mysterio's pod] Think of it as me setting you free.
Punk: [To Undertaker, after elimination R-Truth] You'd better pray that your pod door opens last, 'cause when you come out, I'm gonna make you tap out, just like I did before. [To John Morrison] And I'm gonna prove to you that your decadent rock life will get you nowhere. I'm gonna prove to the world that straight-edge means I'm better than you! For those of you at home, feel free, place your hand on the screen and feel CM Punk flow through you!
Lawler: Matt, did you just put your hand on the screen?
Striker: Yes.
Lawler: Do you feel CM Punk flow through you?
Punk: Nobody can stop me!
Cole: Guys, the sermon's over in [checking the timer] three seconds.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Elimination Chamber - February 21, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Richard Huelsenbeck photo
Su Tseng-chang photo

“The DPP will engage (mainland) China with a positive attitude and confidence, hoping to foster constructive and well-intentioned dialogues, while maintaining the party’s values and basic positions. Unfortunately, China remains stubborn and has always tried to coerce Taiwan into a framework defined by nobody but China.”

Su Tseng-chang (1947) Taiwanese politician

Su Tseng-chang (2013) cited in " DPP tells PRC to respect public, party views http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/11/28/2003577848" on Taipei Times, 28 November 2013.

“I killed nobody that didn't deserve killing. In all of these here killings there was no alternative. You couldn't call them cold-blooded killings…. It was either my life or theirs.”

To Mike Wallace in an ABC-TV-interview in Los Angeles (May 18, 1957). Quoted in LA Times http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2007/05/cohen_talks.html (May 19, 1957).

“The children whom nobody leads by the hand are the children who know they are children.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Voces (1943)

John Lehman photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On a Dull Writer, reported in John Hawkesworth, The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin (1754), p. 265. Alternately attributed to Alexander Pope by Bartlett's Quotations, 10th Edition (1919). Compare: "His wit invites you by his looks to come, But when you knock, it never is at home", William Cowper, Conversation, line 303
Disputed

Stephen Fry photo

“I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

On Jan Moir's column on the death of Stephen Gately.
Quoted in The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/jan-moir-column-on-stephe_n_323964.html
2000s

“Nobody wanted this commercialization of life.”

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter II, The Economic Revolution, p. 21

Vera Brittain photo
Roger Ebert photo
Bel Kaufmanová photo
Stephen King photo

“If dogs could fly, nobody would go out without an umbrella.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Stephen King (StephenKing) 4 sept 2017 18:28 Tweet https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/904878959766245377

Leo Tolstoy photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Ernest Hollings photo

“When E. F. Hollings talks, nobody listens.”

Ernest Hollings (1922–2019) politician from the United States

Alluding to the E. F. Hutton commercial of the 1980s, in reference to his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1984. A sharp tongue can still draw victim's blood, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Connelley, Joel, February 3, 1986, December 8, 2009 http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1986/8601030327.asp,

Michael Moorcock photo
James Weldon Johnson photo

“Whose starward eye
Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he
That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh,
“Nobody knows de trouble I see”?”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

O Black and Unknown Bards, st. 2.
Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917)

Nicolas Chamfort photo
Christopher Lloyd photo
Jack LaLanne photo

“It tasted terrible, so I mixed it with prune juice and fruits. Nobody thought about it until then. We made the guy a millionaire.”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

On Yami Yoghurt which he sponsored quoted in "Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96, New York Times."

Thomas Hardy photo

“Arms trade. If there was a legitimate trade, they'd sell those things - guns and bombs - in a supermarket. It would be like a cosmetics demonstration, and you'd have a little bit of shopping music in the background. And so, here's our arms trade demonstrator. 'Hello, and welcome to our new "Twilight of the World" range - our stunning new collection for nuclear winter. Now, for those persistent racial problems, why not try our new ethnic cleanser, "Pogrom"? Apply vigorously to the affected area, and then wipe off the face of the earth. For persistent outbreaks, to eliminate those last spots of resistance, why not try our new "I Can't Believe It's Not a Kalashnikov"? Go on, leaders, treat yourself. Tell yourself "I want it, I need it, I'll have it". Now, for those particularly sensitive areas, why not try our new range, "U. N."? It's entirely cosmetic; it does nothing. Apply half-heartedly with our new hand-wringing cream. Now, people often come up to me and say "Can you save my face?" Well, I can. So for those secret little deals - those secret little Iraqi liaisons - why not try "Embargo", the mark of the middleman? Now, for a touch of mystery, why not visit the "Missing Body Shop"? Collect your free nail remover and watch your problems disappear. Now, you're probably sitting there thinking "Oh, I'm such a hideous old blood-soaked dictator of a thing; nobody will deal with me". How wrong you are! We are sole suppliers to the US government of "Turn-a-Blind-Eye Liner" - use always in conjunction with "Oil of Kuwaiti", a touch of "Massacre" and blusher. Oh, you won't need that. I'm Marlene from the House of Charnel. Thank you for your time and patience. And for that finishing touch - for those romantic evenings when you really want to take the enemy out - why not try our stunning new nerve gas, "Paralyse" by Calvin Klein.' (Linda Live 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“I started to see this pattern being there. It was a small office and you can hear everybody talking. And it was just always a lot of activity. Because, you know it started out with the FBI Filegate problem when Craig Livingston (director of the White House’s Office of Personnel Security) got all of those FBI files on so many people. Like 900 files. And if they said 900 it was probably a thousand nine hundred. And then you had the travel office fiasco. Then Whitewater in ‘94 was really starting to kick in. And at that time Robert Fiske was the special prosecutor; that’s before Ken Starr. And they were looking at indicting all kinds of people…And of course, the Clintons were very, very involved with that. There were just so many of those scandals. Cheryl Mills was in and out of the office. The whole cast of characters. They’ve been around forever. I just started hearing over and over and over again. The first time I heard it I thought it, wow! And I heard Bernie Nussbaum talking extremely very loudly. To Hillary. And basically said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Hillary. All you have to say is you don’t recall. You don’t remember anything. Nobody can argue with that.”

Kathleen Willey (1946) White House aide

Kathleen Willey: I Overheard White House Staff Teaching Hillary Her Trademark ‘I Don’t Recall’ Defense https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/05/kathleen-willey-overheard-white-house-staff-teaching-hillary-trademark-dont-recall-defense/ (September 3, 2016)

Kenneth Grahame photo
Bill Mauldin photo
Richard Stallman photo

“Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.”

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

Richard Stallman's dissenting view on Steve Jobs http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/steve-jobs-stallman-dissenting-view.html in The Los Angeles Times (8 October 2011)
2010s

Woody Guthrie photo

“Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking my freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

The last line of this last stanza is also sometimes rendered "This land is made for you and me."
This Land Is Your Land (1940; 1944)

Christopher Titus photo

“And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be,—
I care for nobody, no, not I,
If no one cares for me.”

Isaac Bickerstaffe (1733–1812) Irish playwright and librettist

Love in a Village (1762), Act i, scene 2. Compare: "If naebody care for me, I'll care for naebody", Robert Burns, I hae a Wife o' my Ain; "I envy none, no, no, not I, And no one envies me", Charles Mackay, The King and the Miller.

Theodor Mommsen photo

“Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, pg 163, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Thomas Hardy photo
William Safire photo

“Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can’t beat Somebody with Nobody.”

William Safire (1929–2009) American journalist

As quoted in The Quotable Politician https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/159228132X, William B. Whitman, Global Pequot (2003), p. 60.
Letter to H. R. Haldeman

Richard Feynman photo

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

Variant: I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 6, “Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” p. 129

Slavoj Žižek photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“America is the place where you can not kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that. They sometimes find the team a little difficult to drive, but they sooner or later whip it into harness.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

"Address at Opera House, Helena Montana" (September 11, 1919), in, Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 154.
1910s

Nikolai Berdyaev photo

“In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Martin Gayford, "Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/09/22/bagay22.xml The Telegraph(22 September 2001)
2000s

C. N. R. Rao photo
Lillian Gish photo
Robert Jordan photo

“Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Perrin Aybara
(15 January 1990)

Goran Višnjić photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 157

Gloria Estefan photo
Harriet Harman photo
Georges Braque photo
Prem Rawat photo
A.A. Milne photo
Mr. T photo
Jimmy Buffett photo

“Wasted away again in Margaritaville,
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that there's a woman to blame,
But I know it's nobody's fault.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Margaritaville
Song lyrics, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977)

Tamsin Greig photo
Roger Ebert photo
Norman Mailer photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 1

Tom Lehrer photo

“I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
Like nobody else,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"The Masochism Tango"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Tom Stoppard photo
Eliot Spitzer photo

“One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition.”

Eliot Spitzer (1959) 54th Governor of New York

[William D. Cohan, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-01/how-wall-street-scams-counties-into-bankruptcy.html, How Wall Street Scams Counties into Bankruptcy, Bloomberg L.P., July 1, 2012, 2012-10-15]

Glenn Beck photo
Gino Severini photo

“In our young days, when Modigliani and I first came to Paris, in 1906, nobody was very clear about ideas. But unconsciously, we knew quite a lot of things, of which we became aware later on.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

In an interview, 1956; as quoted in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p. 247

Allen Ginsberg photo

“Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Glen Burns (1983), Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955, Peter Lang GmbH, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6.
Great Poets Howl

Philip K. Dick photo
Heather Brooke photo
Andrei Tarkovsky photo
Kent Hovind photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Nobody really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Frederick Douglass photo

“The great fact underlying the claim for universal suffrage is that every man is himself and belongs to himself, and represents his own individuality, not only in form and features, but in thought and feeling. And the same is true of woman. She is herself, and can be nobody else than herself. Her selfhood is as perfect and as absolute as is the selfhood of man.”

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

Speech at the New England Woman Suffrage Association (May 24, 1886) Nicholas Buccola, edit., The Essential Douglass: Selected Writings & Speeches, Hackett Publishing Company, 2016, p. 307. Sometimes referred to as his “Who and What is Woman?” speech
1880s

Will Cuppy photo

“He believed you could reach the East by going west. That is true enough, if you don't overdo it. You can reach Long Island City by taking the ferry for Weehawken, but nobody does it on purpose.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Christopher Columbus

Noam Chomsky photo
August Macke photo
George Soros photo
Richard Feynman photo
Pete Doherty photo
Jim Starlin photo
Vyjayanthimala photo

“I always cribbed about having such a long name and my grandmother would say that nobody else will be called ‘Vyjayanthimala.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

In "Why Vyjayanthimala has 'nothing to say' about today's heroines".

Václav Havel photo

“There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed.
Fortunately, that time has passed.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

Asif Ali Zardari photo

“I still don't think like that. Because of Benazir, nobody else [in her party] was thinking about leadership. This position comes about only because of the vacuum that was created with her death.”

Asif Ali Zardari (1955) politician in Pakistan

Zardari at an interview of Newsweek, answering about his presidency http://www.newsweek.com/qa-asif-ali-zardari-pervez-musharrafs-resignation-88063

Chris Rock photo

“I ain't shooting nobody, so call me a faggot. When the war's over, I'll be the faggot with two legs.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Bigger and Blacker (HBO, 1999)