Quotes about plenty

A collection of quotes on the topic of plenty, people, time, timing.

Quotes about plenty

Alan Rickman photo
Britney Spears photo

“There will be a "Oops 100." They'll be plenty more oopses. I'm not perfect. I'm human.”

Britney Spears (1981) American singer, dancer and actress

Matt Lauer interview http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13347509/page/4/, MSNBC (14 June 2006)

Anne Frank photo
Alan Turing photo

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 460.
Source: Computing machinery and intelligence

Johnny Depp photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Eoin Colfer photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Rosa Parks photo
John Green photo

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Francis Drake photo

“There is plenty of time to win this game, and to thrash the Spaniards too.”

Francis Drake (1540–1596) English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era

Reputedly while playing Bowls at Plymouth Hoe, upon being informed that the Spanish Armada had been sighted approaching England. ([29 July, 1588, 19 July]); This attribution is not known to have appeared in writing until 1736, so its authenticity remains uncertain.
Disputed
Variant: There's time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too.

Carl Panzram photo
George Orwell photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Frank Zappa photo

“Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 239; this may be derived from a similar observation by Harlan Ellison which is sometimes misattributed to Zappa: "The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

Kurt Cobain photo

“There is plenty of Hühnerfleisch in the Kühlschrank. (There is plenty of chicken in the fridge.)”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

1991-08-27 at Bremen, Germany
Stage banter

Jean Webster photo
Steven Pinker photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Frances Hodgson Burnett photo
Jay Nordlinger photo
Mark Twain photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Claude Monet photo
Novalis photo
Paul McCartney photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Muhammad al-Baqir photo
Sai Baba of Shirdi photo

“The wretched and the miserable would rise to plenty of joy and happiness.”

Sai Baba of Shirdi (1836–1918) Hindu and muslim saint

Eleven important sayings

Tennessee Williams photo
A.E. Housman photo
Jacque Fresco photo

“Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is irrelevant and counter-productive to our survival.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Source: The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War (2002), p. 158.

Kurt Vonnegut photo
Erhard Milch photo

“Let them try me. I shall have plenty to say about the Allies. I have some very good friends among the Americans and English, and the French industrialists, too. I have done nothing of which I am ashamed.”

Erhard Milch (1892–1972) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, March 13, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Barack Obama photo
Joe Satriani photo

“Guitars are fun. There are plenty of different kinds to play. They look cool. They sound cool. Don't *you* want to play guitar?”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in Musician magazine (November 1996).

Jack Dempsey photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.”

St. 4
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/

Françoise Sagan photo
John Locke photo
Lewis Carroll photo

“If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics – it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Three Years in a Curatorship, By One Whom It Has Tried, 1886

Mark Twain photo

“A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.”

Roughing It (published 1872)
Roughing It (1872)

Ben Horowitz photo
Thomas Paine photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Ovid photo

“Plenty has made me poor.”
Inopem me copia fecit.

Book III, 466
Variant translation: Abundance makes me poor.
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Barack Obama photo

“People of goodwill, regardless of party, are too plentiful for those with ill will to change history’s currents.”

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

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: To dismiss the magnitude of this progress -- to suggest, as some sometimes do, that little has changed -- that dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years. Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Martin Luther King Jr. -- they did not die in vain. Their victory was great. But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote, or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all, and the criminal justice system is not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails, it requires vigilance. And we'll suffer the occasional setback. But we will win these fights. This country has changed too much. People of goodwill, regardless of party, are too plentiful for those with ill will to change history’s currents.

Desiderius Erasmus photo

“But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

Letter to Lambertus Grunnius (August 1516), publised in Life and Letters of Erasmus : Lectures delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1894) http://books.google.com/books?id=ussXAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA180&lpg=PA180&dq=%22is+no+discipline+and+which+are+worse+than+brothels%22&source=bl&ots=PnJjrkSLNB&sig=JPY0PhTf2YgYwJlf3uH2eTvCJeA&hl=en&ei=BGwXTNqTA5XANu6_pJ8L&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22is%20no%20discipline%20and%20which%20are%20worse%20than%20brothels%22&f=false edited by James Anthony Froude, p. 180
Context: There are monasteries where there is no discipline, and which are worse than brothels — ut prae his lupanaria sint et magis sobria et magis pudica. There are others where religion is nothing but ritual; and these are worse than the first, for the Spirit of God is not in them, and they are inflated with self-righteousness. There are those, again, where the brethren are so sick of the imposture that they keep it up only to deceive the vulgar. The houses are rare indeed where the rule is seriously observed, and even in these few, if you look to the bottom, you will find small sincerity. But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession. Suppose a house where all is as it ought to be, you have no security that it will continue so. A good superior may be followed by a fool or a tyrant, or an infected brother may introduce a moral plague. True, in extreme cases a monk may change his house, or even may change his order, but leave is rarely given. There is always a suspicion of something wrong, and on the least complaint such a person is sent back.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Practical Politics" in The Outlook (26 April 1913) http://books.google.com/books?id=ZD5YAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA936
1910s
Context: There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

Thucydides photo
Al Capone photo
Barack Obama photo

“It should not be Democratic or Republican, it should not be a partisan issue to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the FBI to use the criminal justice system as a cudgel to punish our political opponents. Or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution because an election happens to be coming up. I’m not making that up. That’s not hypothetical. It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because they say things or publish stories we don’t like. I complained plenty about Fox News but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people. It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say we don’t target certain groups of people based on what they look like or how they pray. We are Americans. We’re supposed to stand up to bullies. Not follow them. We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad. I’ll be honest, sometimes I get into arguments with progressive friends about what the current political movement requires. There are well-meaning folks passionate about social justice, who think things have gotten so bad, the lines have been so starkly drawn, that we have to fight fire with fire, we have to do the same things to the Republicans that they do to us, adopt their tactics, say whatever works, make up stuff about the other side. I don’t agree with that.”

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

2018, Speech at the University of Illinoise Speech (2018)

Tennessee Williams photo

“All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes — and woman accepts the proposal!”

To vary that old, old saying a little bit — I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!
Amanda, Scene Six
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Desiderius Erasmus photo

“There are monasteries where there is no discipline, and which are worse than brothels — ut prae his lupanaria sint et magis sobria et magis pudica. There are others where religion is nothing but ritual; and these are worse than the first, for the Spirit of God is not in them, and they are inflated with self-righteousness. There are those, again, where the brethren are so sick of the imposture that they keep it up only to deceive the vulgar. The houses are rare indeed where the rule is seriously observed, and even in these few, if you look to the bottom, you will find small sincerity. But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession. Suppose a house where all is as it ought to be, you have no security that it will continue so. A good superior may be followed by a fool or a tyrant, or an infected brother may introduce a moral plague. True, in extreme cases a monk may change his house, or even may change his order, but leave is rarely given. There is always a suspicion of something wrong, and on the least complaint such a person is sent back.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

Letter to Lambertus Grunnius (August 1516), published in Life and Letters of Erasmus : Lectures delivered at Oxford 1893-4 (1894) http://books.google.com/books?id=ussXAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA180&lpg=PA180&dq=%22is+no+discipline+and+which+are+worse+than+brothels%22&source=bl&ots=PnJjrkSLNB&sig=JPY0PhTf2YgYwJlf3uH2eTvCJeA&hl=en&ei=BGwXTNqTA5XANu6_pJ8L&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22is%20no%20discipline%20and%20which%20are%20worse%20than%20brothels%22&f=false edited by James Anthony Froude, p. 180

Lewis Carroll photo

“If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them.
Three Years in a Curatorship, By One Whom It Has Tried, 1886

John Steinbeck photo
Fritz Leiber photo
Rick Riordan photo
Stephen King photo
Aleksandar Hemon photo
Mindy Kaling photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“I go by the gut. I might not appear to have any talent but I've got plenty of gut instinct.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: 1Q84 BOOK 1

Suzanne Collins photo

“there's plenty of blame to go around.”

Source: Mockingjay

Jenny Han photo
Jodi Picoult photo

“When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you
have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.”

Variant: when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw
Source: House Rules

Robert F. Kennedy photo
Stephen King photo

“In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite possibility. (17)”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

Alexander McCall Smith photo

“There is plenty of work for love to do.”

Source: Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

Niccolo Machiavelli photo

“Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.”

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) Italian politician, Writer and Author

Variant: Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

Haruki Murakami photo
Victor Hugo photo
Richelle Mead photo
Christopher Isherwood photo
Lydia Davis photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Harper Lee photo

“If you did not want much, there was plenty.”

Source: Go Set a Watchman

Agatha Christie photo
Nick Hornby photo
H. Jackson Brown, Jr. photo
Harriet Martineau photo

“Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.”

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) English writer and sociologist
Kate Douglas Wiggin photo
Nick Hornby photo
Rick Riordan photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence”

Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Context: Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.