Quotes about prize
page 2

Alexander Maclaren photo
John Banville photo
Milton Friedman photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“My master ought to have remembered what
A glittering prize can do to bend the will,
Yet at the crucial moment he forgot
And all his fortune changed from good to ill.”

Dovea in memoria avere il signor mio,
Che l'oro e 'l premio ogni durezza inchina;
Ma, quando bisognò, l'ebbe in oblio,
Ed ei si procacciò la sua ruina.
Canto XLIII, stanza 70 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Margaret Fuller photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo

“I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science

Adam Smith photo
Henry Newbolt photo

“To set the cause above renown,
To love the game above the prize.”

Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) English poet and writer

The Island Race (1898).

Henryk Sienkiewicz photo
C. V. Raman photo
Aldo Palazzeschi photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo
Dana Gioia photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2009-10-12
Morning Joe
MSNBC, quoted in * 2009-10-12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/christopher-hitchens-pans_n_317373.html
Christopher Hitchens Pans Obama's Nobel Prize
Huffington Post
Nicholas
Graham
2000s, 2009

Walt Whitman photo

“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done!
The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Memories of President Lincoln. O Captain! my Captain!
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Klaus Kinski photo

“I don't care about that scum! Why should I receive a prize? I know that I'm a genius!”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

As quoted by Werner Herzog, in My Best Fiend, (1999)

Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Paul Desmond photo
Henry Clay photo

“Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.”

Henry Clay (1777–1852) American politician from Kentucky

Reported in The Clay Code, or Text-Book of Eloquence, a Collection of Axioms, Apothegms, Sentiments … Gathered from the Public Speeches of Henry Clay, ed. G. Vandenhoff (1844), p. 93.

C. N. R. Rao photo
Alan Bennett photo
Tim Parks photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Fred Rogers photo

“It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Commencement Address at Middlebury College May, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20030906163501/http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/general_info/addresses/Fred_Rogers_2001.htm

Akio Morita photo
William Cullen Bryant photo

“Loveliest of lovely things are they,
On earth, that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson http://www.4literature.net/William_Cullen_Bryant/Scene_on_the_Banks_of_the_Hudson/, st. 3 (1828)

Martin Firrell photo

“It is perfectly reasonable to despair of a world where the Nobel Committee gives the Peace Prize to a man running a war.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

Quoted as work in progress at martinfirrell.com.

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Margaret Fuller photo

“I prize thy gentle heart,
Free from ambition, falsehood, or art,
And thy good mind,
Daily refined,
By pure desire
To fan the heaven-seeking fire.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), A Greeting

Garry Kasparov photo

“Anatoly Karpov and I donated the prize fund from our 1986 world championship match to the Chernobyl victim relief fund.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Source: 2010s, Winter is Coming (2015), p. 17

James Branch Cabell photo

“Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried — well,
Which one would I?”

Epigraph to "Book Four : Which Travels, roundabout, to edifying and safe conclusions"
The Cream of the Jest (1917)

Joseph Hopkinson photo
Frederick William Robertson photo

“This world is given as a prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 205.

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Henry Adams photo
Warren Buffett photo
Kevin Barry photo

“I won't be happy until I'm up there, receiving the Nobel Prize.”

Kevin Barry (1902–1920) 18 year old medical student and Irish republican, executed by Britain.

Leader Interview..with Kevin Barry http://www.limerickleader.ie/lifestyle/entertainment-arts/whats-on/leader-interview-with-kevin-barry-1-2181685, Limerick Leader (1 November 2007)

Margaret Thatcher photo

“The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in Perth, Scotland (13 May 1983), quoted in New York Times (14 May 1983) "British Vote Campaign Gets Off to Angry Start"
First term as Prime Minister

Jane Fonda photo

“The trick is to be Zen about it. Winning is sometimes not the prize”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

On Twitter before the 2009 Tony Awards, as quoted by Canada East/Associated Press. Notable quotes from 2009 Tony Awards. 8 June 2009. http://www.canadaeast.com/entertainment/article/692573

Bob Woodward photo

“It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes.”

Bob Woodward (1943) American journalist

Post Reporter's Pulitzer Prize Is Withdrawn; Pulitzer Board Withdraws Post Reporter's Prize (19 April 1981)

Lawrence Wright photo
Arjo Klamer photo
Bob Dylan photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“A Conquest, without facing dangers is as dull as Victory without a shining glory. A game without a prize!”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

C. N. R. Rao photo
Friedrich Hayek photo
John Ball (priest) photo

“Now reigneth pride in prize
and covetousness is held wise,
and lechery without shame
and gluttony without blame.
Envy reigneth with treason
and sloth is taken in great season.
God do boot, for now is time. Amen.”

John Ball (priest) (1338–1381) English rebel and priest

Letter to the people, quoted in Annals, or a General Chronicle of England by John Stow. "Boot" here means "amends," as in the ancient Anglo-Saxon laws

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“I must make a protest against the sort of exaggerations in which the noble Lord has indulged. He has described the railway launching 2,000 or 3,000 ruffians upon some quiet neighbourhood in a manner that might lead one to imagine the train conveyed a set of banditti to plunder, rack, and ravage the country, murder the people, burn the houses, and commit every sort of atrocity…they may conceive it to be a very harmless pursuit…Some people look upon it as an exhibition of manly courage, characteristic of the people of this country. I saw the other day a long extract from a French newspaper describing this fight as a type of the national character for endurance, patience under suffering of indomitable perseverance, in determined effort, and holding it up as a specimen of the manly and admirable qualities of the British race…I do not perceive why any number of persons, say 1,000 if you please, who assemble to witness a prize fight, are in their own persons more guilty of a breach of the peace than an equal number of persons who assemble to witness a balloon ascent. There they stand; there is no breach of the peace; they go to see a sight, and when that sight is over they return, and no injury is done to any one. They only stand or sit on the grass to witness the performance, and as to the danger to those who perform themselves, I imagine the danger to life in the case of those who go up in balloons is certainly greater than that of two combatants who merely hit each other as hard as they can, but inflict no permanent injury upon each other.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/may/15/papers-moved-for-1 in the House of Commons (15 May 1860) on the illegal prize-fight between Tom Sayers and J. C. Heenan. The Radical MP Colonel Dickson replied that although "He sat on a different side of the House from the noble Lord, and did not often find himself in the same lobby with him on a division; but he would say for the noble Viscount, that if he had one attribute more than another which endeared him to his countrymen it was his thoroughly English character and his love for every manly sport". Palmerston was rumoured to have attended the fight and he contributed the first guinea to the collection for Sayers in the House of Commons.
1860s

John Green photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Robert Sheckley photo

“Your predator is close behind you and will infallibly be your death.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Carmody said, in a moment of strange calm.” But in terms of long-range planning, I never did expect to get out of this Universe alive.”
“That is meaningless,” the Prize said. “The fact is, you have lost everything.”
“I don’t agree,” Carmody said. “Permit me to point out that I am presently still alive.”
“Agreed. But only for the moment.”
“I have always been alive only for the moment,” Carmody said. “I could never count on more. It was my error to expect more. That holds true, I believe, for all of my possible and potential circumstances.”
“Then what do you hope to achieve with your moment?”
“Nothing,” Carmody said. “Everything.”
“I don’t understand you any longer,” the Prize said. “Something about you has changed, Carmody. What is it?”
“A minor thing,” Carmody told him. “I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the Gods run in their heavenly sideshow. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don’t need it. I have my moment, which is quite enough.”
“Saint Carmody,” the Prize said, in tones of deepest sarcasm. “No more than a shadow’s breadth separates you and death! What will you do now with your pitiable moment?”

“I shall continue to live it,” Carmody said. “That is what moments are for.”
Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 28 (pp. 189-190; closing words)

Edwin Hubble photo

“She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work.”

Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) American astronomer

Often said by Hubble about Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

James D. Watson photo

“I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.
Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.
Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.”

Description of Rosalind Franklin, whose data and research were actually key factors in determining the structure of DNA, but who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, before the importance of her work could be widely recognized and acknowledged. In response to these remarks her mother stated "I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way." As quoted in "Rosalind Franklin" at Strange Science : The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology by Michon Scott http://www.strangescience.net/rfranklin.htm
The Double Helix (1968)

Thomas Love Peacock photo

“The mountain sheep are sweeter
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it...

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.”

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company

"The War-Song of Dinas Vawr", stanzas 1 and 3, from The Misfortunes of Elphin, chapter XI (1829). In the same chapter this is described as "the quintessence of all the war-songs that ever were written, and the sum and substance of all the appetencies, tendencies, and consequences of military glory".

Leung Chun-ying photo

“I believe that Deng Xiaoping should have been the first Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner, not [political prisoner] Liu Xiaobo.”

Leung Chun-ying (1954) Hong Kong politician

2010

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29426277

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/hongkong/11133867/Who-is-CY-Leung-and-why-do-the-Hong-Kong-protesters-want-him-to-resign.html

Shanna Moakler photo

“As long as I'm the director of Miss Nevada, we will never award fur coats as prizes, and I urge my fellow pageant directors to make the same pledge. Kind people today are taking a stand against cruelty to animals—so a fur coat is no prize for a compassionate, socially-aware woman.”

Shanna Moakler (1975) American actress and model

Statement to PETA, as quoted in "Miss USA Winners Pose Naked in Sexy New PETA Ad", E! Online (June 13, 2013) https://www.eonline.com/uk/news/429232/miss-usa-winners-pose-naked-in-sexy-new-peta-ad-check-it-out.

Pushyamitra Shunga photo

“The climax was reached when the same Marxist professors started explaining away Islamic iconoclasm in terms of what they described as Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain places of worship. They have never been able to cite more than half-a-dozen cases of doubtful veracity. A few passages in Sanskrit literature coupled with speculations about some archaeological sites have sufficed for floating the story, sold ad nauseam in the popular press, that Hindus destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples on a large scale. Half-a-dozen have become thousands and then hundreds of thousands in the frenzied imagination suffering from a deep-seated anti-Hindu animus…. And these “facts” have been presented with a large dose of suppressio veri suggestio falsi…. A very late Buddhist book from Sri Lanka accuses Pushyamitra Sunga, a second century B. C. king, of offering prizes to those who brought to him heads of Buddhist monks. This single reference has sufficed for presenting Pushyamitra as the harbinger of a “Brahmanical reaction” which “culminated in the age of the Guptas.” The fact that the famous Buddhist stupas and monasteries at Bharhut and Sanchi were built and thrived under the very nose of Pushyamitra is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that the Gupta kings and queens built and endowed many Buddhist monasteries at Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Sarnath among many other places. (…) This placing of Hindu kings on par with Muslim invaders in the context of iconoclasm suffers from serious shortcomings. Firstly, it lacks all sense of proportion when it tries to explain away the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain temples by Islamic invaders in terms of the doubtful destruction of a few Buddhist and Jain shrines by Hindu kings. Secondly, it has yet to produce evidence that Hindus ever had a theology of iconoclasm which made this practice a permanent part of Hinduism. Isolated acts by a few fanatics whom no Hindu historian or pandit has ever admired, cannot explain away a full-fledged theology which inspired Islamic iconoclasm….”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

S.R. Goel, Some Historical Questions (Indian Express, April 16, 1989), quoted in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.

John F. Kennedy photo
John Banville photo
John Updike photo
Nadine Gordimer photo
Francis Escudero photo
George W. Bush photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo

“For the majority, I take it, who live all their lives with such obtuse faculties of thinking, it is a difficult thing to perform this feat of mental analysis and of discriminating the material vehicle from the immanent beauty, … Owing to this men give up all search after the true Beauty. Some slide into mere sensuality. Others incline in their desires to dead metallic coin. Others limit their imagination of the beautiful to worldly honours, fame, and power. There is another class which is enthusiastic about art and science. The most debased make their gluttony the test of what is good. But he who turns from all grosser thoughts and all passionate longings after what is seeming, and explores the nature of the beauty which is simple, immaterial, formless, would never make a mistake like that when he has to choose between all the objects of desire; he would never be so misled by these attractions as not to see the transient character of their pleasures and not to win his way to an utter contempt for every one of them. This, then, is the path to lead us to the discovery of the Beautiful. All other objects that attract men's love, be they never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift them to that height to which sense can never reach.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 11

Ernest Hemingway photo
Edmund White photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

Andrew Carnegie photo

“Did you ever sum up these prizes and think how very little the millionaire has beyond the peasant, and how very often his additions tend not to happiness but to misery!”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

Source: Round the World, 1884, p. 353 General Conclusions.

Marcus Aurelius photo
Steven Chu photo

“I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, “That’s nice — and when are you going to see me next?””

Steven Chu (1948) American physicist, former United States Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate

NY Times, April 16, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-q4-t.html?_r=4

Kevin Barry photo

“A prize with money attached to it has a lot of prestige.”

Kevin Barry (1902–1920) 18 year old medical student and Irish republican, executed by Britain.

Kevin Barry shortlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/kevin-barry-shortlisted-for-the-international-impac-dublin-literary-award-1.1353167, The Irish Times (9 April 2013)

Zbigniew Herbert photo
Adrienne Rich photo
Colin Wilson photo
Malala Yousafzai photo

“I think that it's really an early age… I would feel proud, when I would work for education, when I would have done something, when I would be feeling confident to tell people, 'Yes! I have built that school; I have done that teachers' training, I have sent that (many) children to school'… Then if I get the Nobel Peace Prize, I will be saying, Yeah, I deserve it, somehow… I want to become a Prime Minister of Pakistan, and I think it's really good. Because through politics I can serve my whole county. I can be the doctor of the whole country… I can spend much of the money from the budget on education," she told It appears that becoming prime minister is a means to the end she has dedicated her life to… [in recalling when she got shot] He asked, 'Who is Malala?' He did not give me time to answer his question… He fired three bullets… One bullet hit me in the left side of my forehead, just above here, and it went down through my neck and into my shoulder… But still if I look at (it), it's a miracle… A Nobel Peace Prize would help me to begin this campaign for girls' education… But the real call, the most precious call, that I want to get and for which I'm thirsting and for which I want to struggle hard, that is the award to see every child to go to school, that is the award of peace and education for every child. And for that, I will struggle and I will work hard.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Interview on CNN with Christiane Amanpour (October 11, 2013)

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Thomas Gray photo

“Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters gold.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 7
On the Death of a Favourite Cat http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odfc (1747)

Kofi Annan photo
Jonah Goldberg photo

“I bet you anything I could destroy Milton Friedman in a debate about economics — so long as the audience was comprised of five year olds. He may have a Nobel Prize, but I can make offensive sounds with my armpit. Advantage: Goldberg!”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

July 19, 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200407190837.asp
2000s, 2004

Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden photo

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Page 139
No such headline has ever been found in The Times at the period in question (the spring and summer of 1929), though one paragraph reads "An earthquake was felt yesterday between Illapel, to the north, and Talca, to the south, in Chile. No damage was done." (August 6, 1929). Source: The Quote... Unquote Newsletter (October, 2000) pp. 2-3.
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

Henry Ford photo
Joan Miró photo

“.. something as sensational as [a] heavy weight prize fight…. a rain of swings, uppercuts, and straight right and lefts to the stomach and everywhere throughout the entire event – a round lasting about twenty minutes. [remark on a ballet Miro planned to, c. 1930]”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Quote of Miró in 'Bravo' Barcelona 1994; as cited in Calder Miro, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 37
1915 - 1940

Pauline Kael photo