Quotes about paper

A collection of quotes on the topic of paper, likeness, use, doing.

Quotes about paper

José Baroja photo
Niall Horan photo

“I'd rather be called a boy and play with paper air-planes than be called a man and play with a girl's heart.”

Niall Horan (1993) Irish singer and songwriter

Dare to Dream by One Direction, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6422638.Niall_Horan

Paul Watson photo

“It's dangerous & humiliating. The whalers killed whales while green peace watched. Now, you don't walk by a child that is being abused, you don't walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but "bear witness" as they call it. I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said "how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal". I think the rangers' answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said "Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Herrari and a man ran out of Bark Place Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you'd pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?" This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in… Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist
Al-Mutanabbi photo

“The desert knows me well, the night, the mounted men
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen”

Al-Mutanabbi (915–965) Arabic poet from the Abbasid era

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O04oUcNXmdI
Context: When the lion bares his teeth, do not
fancy that the lion shows to you a smile.
I have slain the man that sought my heart's blood many a time,
Riding a noble mare whose back none else may climb,
Whose hind and fore-legs seem in galloping as one,
Nor hand nor foot requireth she to urge her on.
And O the days when I have swung my fine-edged glaive
Amidst a sea of death where wave was dashed on wave!
The desert knows me well, the night, the mounted men
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen

Osama bin Laden photo

“First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

1990s, Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (1998)

Suman Pokhrel photo

“In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/</span>
From Prose

Tupac Shakur photo
Dmitri Shostakovich photo
The Notorious B.I.G. photo

“Goodness Gracious The Paper! Where the Cash at? Where the Stash at?”

The Notorious B.I.G. (1972–1997) American rapper

"Gimme The Loot"
Song lyrics

Ned Kelly photo
Michael Crichton photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo

“At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

"The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941)
Source: Why I Write
Context: Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

Pablo Picasso photo

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider’s web. This is a spider's web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 258 (translation Daphne Woodward)
1960s

Merce Cunningham photo
Michael Jackson photo
Paul McCartney photo
George Orwell photo
Fernando Pessoa photo

“Eat your chocolates, little girl,
Eat your chocolates!
Believe me, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,
And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.
Eat, dirty little girl, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!
But I think and, removing the silver paper that's tinfoil,
I throw it all on the ground, as I've thrown out life.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Come chocolates, pequena;
Come chocolates!
Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates.
Olha que as religiões todas não ensinam mais que a confeitaria.
Come, pequena suja, come!
Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes!
Mas eu penso e, ao tirar o papel de prata, que é de folhas de estanho,
Deito tudo para o chão, como tenho deitado a vida.
Tabacaria (1928), trans. Richard Zenith

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
Catherine the Great photo

“You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Letter to Denis Diderot, as quoted in The Affairs of Women : A Modern Miscellany (2006) by Colin Bingham

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Franz Kafka photo
William Shakespeare photo

“No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth”

Variant: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills
Source: Richard II

Anne Frank photo

“Paper is more patient than man.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Variant: Because paper has more patience than people.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? p. 17e

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Ludwig Wittgenstein / Quotes / Culture and Value (1980)
1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
Source: Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951

Tariq Ramadan photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Linda Sue Park photo
Terry Pratchett photo

“Words are the litmus paper of the mind.”

Source: Small Gods

George Washington photo

“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Jabez Bowen https://founders.archives.gov/GEWN-04-04-02-0428 (9 January 1787)
1780s

Johann Georg Hamann photo
Douglas Adams photo
Terry Goodkind photo
Neil Young photo

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

Source: Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

Andy Rooney photo
Virginia Woolf photo

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

5 December 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)
Source: A Writer's Diary
Context: This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Rabindranath Tagore photo
Christopher Morley photo

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”

Variant: When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Source: Parnassus on Wheels

Virginia Woolf photo
W.B. Yeats photo
Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Christopher Morley photo
John Lennon photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Sophie Kinsella photo
Michel Foucault photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Eduardo Galeano photo
Hermann Grassmann photo
Warren Zevon photo
Claude Monet photo
Barack Obama photo
Karl Marx photo

“It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

(1857/58)
Source: Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 734.

William Shakespeare photo
Hans-Hermann Hoppe photo

“According to the pronouncements of our state rulers and their intellectual bodyguards (of whom there are more than ever before), we are better protected and more secure than ever. We are supposedly protected from global warming and cooling, from the extinction of animals and plants, from the abuses of husbands and wives, parents and employers, from poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. In fact, however, matters are strikingly different. In order to provide us with all this protection, the state managers expropriate more than 40 percent of the incomes of private producers year in and year out. Government debt and liabilities have increased without interruption, thus increasing the need for future expropriations. Owing to the substitution of government paper money for gold, financial insecurity has increased sharply, and we are continually robbed through currency depreciation. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of laws legislation), thereby creating permanent legal uncertainty and moral hazard. In particular, we have been gradually stripped of the right to exclusion implied in the very concept of private property. … In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on social security and public safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"The Private Production of Defense" http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf (15 June 1999)

Stephen Hawking photo
Sukirti Kandpal photo
Anne Frank photo

“I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

2 January 1944
(1942 - 1944)

Pearl Bailey photo

“What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.”

Pearl Bailey (1918–1990) American singer

Weekly World News, 25 Apr 2005 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3PMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA51&dq=%22What+the+world+really+needs+is+more+love+and+less+paper+work.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-2H5TsbNEcWj8QO14oC5AQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22What%20the%20world%20really%20needs%20is%20more%20love%20and%20less%20paper%20work.%22&f=false

Barack Obama photo
Karl Dönitz photo
George Pólya photo

“Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

[Jon Fripp, Michael Fripp, Deborah Fripp, Speaking of Science: Notable Quotes on Science, Engineering, and the Environment, https://books.google.com/books?id=44ihCUS1XQMC&pg=PA45, 2000, Newnes, 978-1-878707-51-2, 45]

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Lotfi A. Zadeh photo
George Carlin photo

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Ernest Bramah photo
David Tennant photo

“I was once asked for my autograph in the shower on one of my rare visits to the gym. I was washing my hair, facing the wall, when I was tapped on the shoulder so already it's quite inappropriate. I turned round and there was another naked man standing there with a piece of paper. And I think 'if you can't see how inappropriate this I am just going to have to play along' so I took the paper, which is slowly becoming mulch, and carved my name in it.”

David Tennant (1971) Scottish actor

David Tennant on fan obsession, The Graham Norton Show, 14 April 2011
Source: Graham Norton welcomes David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Josh Groban and Jon Richardson, BBC Press Office, 15 April 2011, 15 April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/04_april/15/norton.shtml,

Thomas J. Sargent photo
Bertil Ohlin photo
Ronald Fisher photo

“After all, it is a common weakness of young authors to put too much into their papers.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Contributions to Mathematical Statistics, New York: Wiley, 1950, p. 10.308a.
1950s

Frank P. Ramsey photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Kary Mullis photo
Nicolae Ceaușescu photo
Mark Twain photo
George W. Bush photo

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper!”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks during an oval office meeting (November 2005), attributed in Doug Thompson, Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'" http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml, Capitol Hill Blue (9 December 2005). Thompson has since retracted this claim, explaining: "When some White House sources came to me with a story that claimed George W. Bush called the Constitution a 'god damned piece of paper, I believed it without question because of my personal prejudices against Bush. I now believe I was wrong and that the incident never happened. The story in our database was modified to reflect my belief that I was lied to about the statement and I was wrong to print it" ( "Judge us now to see if we have learned from the past" http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/37544, Capitol Hill Blue (1 January 2011)).
Attributed, Disputed

Barack Obama photo
V.S. Naipaul photo
Arthur Travers Harris photo

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

Gene Fowler (1890–1960) American journalist

Attributed without citation in Janice R. Matthews et al. (2000) Successful Scientific Writing. p. 53
Sometimes attributed to Douglas Adams.

Virginia Woolf photo
Ramana Maharshi photo
Stephen Hawking photo
Marilyn Manson photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Thomas Paine photo

“But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

Orhan Pamuk photo

“The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).

Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Barack Obama photo

“On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago. There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"Obama's a Star Who Doesn't Follow the Script" by John Kass in The Chigago Tribune (27 July 2004)
2004

Julian Assange photo

“You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[‘A real free press for the first time in history’: Wikileaks editor speaks out in London, Journalism.co.uk, 2007-08-12, 2010-08-01, http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2010/07/12/a-real-free-press-for-the-first-time-in-history-wikileaks-editor-speaks-out-in-london/]