Quotes about prize
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“If we truly feel that the Lord liveth, before whom we stand, we shall want nothing else for our work but His smile; and we shall feel that the light of His face is all we need. That thought should deaden our love for outward things. How the things that we fever our souls by pursuing, and fret our hearts when we lose, will cease to attract! How small and vulgar the " prizes " of life, as people call them, will appear!”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 127.

Love, Life, People, Smile

“When I won the Booker Prize, I said that it was nice to see a work of art winning this prize and I've never been forgiven for that. When you get a prize, you're suppose to be humble. Somebody was interviewing me and said, 'This is a great day for Ireland'. I said, 'Why? Ireland didn't do it, I did it.' I wasn't forgiven for that either. I don't wear the green jersey and I don't hobnob with Michael D in the Park, although I quite like Michael D.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Art

“So far, twenty-two people have received the Nobel award in economics. Not one of them has been female—so, to judge only from the past, the most important thing to do if you want to be a Nobel laureate is to be male. I hasten to add that the absence of females is not, I believe, attributable to male chauvinist bias on the part of the Swedish Nobel Committee. I believe that the economics profession as a whole would have been nearly unanimous that, during the period in question, only one female candidate met the relevant standards—the English economist Joan Robinson, who has since died. The failure of the Nobel Committee to award her a prize may well have reflected bias but not sex bias. The economists here will understand what I am talking about. … A second requirement is to be a U. S. citizen. Twelve of the twenty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize were from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, two from Sweden, and one each from four other countries. … Of the twelve Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, nine either studied or taught at the University of Chicago. So the next lesson is to go to the University of Chicago.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"Milton Friedman" in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates

People, Sex, Failure, Understanding

“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.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

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)

Change

“To feel that there is so quick a bound to intercourse, makes us prize the moment, but then also makes it so difficult to use. Yet this one thing I wish to say, where so many must be left unsaid. You tell me, that I may, probably never know you wholly. Indeed the obstacles of time and space may prevent my understanding the workings of character; many pages of my new book may be shut against me, better than to yourself. Perhaps? I believe in Ahnungen beyond anything.”

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

Ahnungen means "Premonitions"; letter XIII to James Nathan (31 March 1845).
The Love Letters Of Margaret Fuller (1903)

Books, Feeling, Understanding, Time

“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

“Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks are many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter VII, Part First, p. 610.

People, World, Search, Loss

“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).

Love, Game

“Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) Polish journalist, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and philanthropist

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1905)

Life, People, World, Thinking

“When the Nobel award was announced I saw it as a personal triumph, an achievement for me and my collaborators -- a recognition for a very remarkable discovery, for reaching the goal I had pursued for 7 years. But when I sat in that crowded hall and I saw the sea of western faces surrounding me, and I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. I felt truly humble when I received the Prize from King Gustav; it was a moment of great emotion but I could restrain myself.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

On the occasion of the Noble Prize award presented to him in 1930 by King Gustova in Stokholm Raman observed Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern Indian Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

People, Personality, Sea, Country

“Catholics in our age when confronted with dogma do not react or yield; they stay neutral, and receive it as one news item among others, as if it were a simple formality. It is as if they lacked the background needed in order to understand. It was the highest point of the Holy Year, the summit to be attained on that morning of All Saints. The prize, the great reward of those who had followed it in faith and fervor. The Pontiff's words flew over the square with a swish of wings, as if a multitude of doves had been released. One had only to close his eyes and let himself be carried away in an ecstasy of light. Instead, it became a perfect example of the contradiction inherent in our age, when man has learned to fly with his body only to forget the great flights of the soul. The people in Saint Peter's square looked like birds with severed wings.”

Aldo Palazzeschi book Roma

Page 182, "1950"
Roma (1953)

People, Age, Faith, Soul

“Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. …there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. …who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence?”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Sense, Universe

“"Between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O'Connor's posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)" (18).”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Books

“Sexual exhibitionism—homosexual or heterosexual—is anathema. The heroic and creative inner struggle of an older generation of Gay Greats, exemplified by the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White, was in the Greek tradition: silent and stoic, principled yet private.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“'AYN RAND, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND HUMAN LIBERATION,'” http://www.wnd.com/2004/07/25485/ WorldNetDaily.com, July 9, 2004 2000s

“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

Peace, Hope

“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)

People, Fear, Weather

“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)

“There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists… Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

“I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness.”

Paul Desmond (1924–1977) American jazz musician

Unsourced

World

“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.

Men

“Prof Rao said he visited the Nobel prize-winning scientist’s (C. V. Raman} laboratory in Bengaluru first as an 11 year-old school boy. “He was the first to recognize my interest in science and has given me a lot of encouragement. He made me a member of the Indian Academy of Sciences when I was only 30. I can never be equal to him.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Quoted in "CNR Rao: Bharat finds a jewel in science".

School, Boy, Science

“I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things.
"The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize."
"Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Introduction, p. x (1994).
Writing Home (1994)

Beauty, Success

“All Dickens is packed with orphans or people in uncertain relation to family groups, or clubs. It’s impossible to read anything he wrote without feeling that the question of belonging was a major issue for him. He had to write about these matters. If we read Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories, weird and unpleasant as they may be, they are all obsessively about fear of otherness—women’s, people of other races’, aliens’. All the over-heated horror of the books arises from this gut fear. He can’t leave it alone. Whether or not we like the books and quite regardless of any verisimilitude, it’s clear that the author is writing directly from his personal concerns. The stuff wasn’t just constructed for a literary prize. A certain form of repetition, particularly the endless reformulation, in dozens of different guises, of the same core conflict is probably the hallmark of authenticity.”

Tim Parks (1954) British writer

"In Search of Authenticity," The New York Review of Books (4 February 2015).

Women, People, Books, Fear

“I simply don't understand why the Nobel academy gave him a peace prize or why Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh gave him a new garden. And I don't see why he should be given a statue in Trafalgar Square, either. If we're after someone who stands up for the oppressed, what about Jesus? I feel fairly sure he never blew up a train.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Mandela Just Doesn't Deserve His Pedestal, p. 239
The World According to Clarkson (2005)

Peace, Feeling, Understanding, Training

“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

Life, Truth, Fear, Soul

“A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Men, Disease, Law, Smile

“We made a completely new kind of transistor (the NPN BJT, and in our development work, our researcher, Leo Esaki, demonstrated the electron tunneling effect, which led to the development of the tunnel diode for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize seventeen years later, after he had joined IBM.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 162.

“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)

Love, Flowers

“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.

War, World, Peace, Despair

“Karrin Murphy: I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Blood Rites (2004)

“3082. To what Purpose shouldest thou seek great Things for thyself in the World? or having obtained them, prize them at any considerable Rate? or value thyself upon them? seeing thou knowest not, but this Night thy Soul may be required of thee, when thou shalt be divested of them all. 'Twould be as vain and unreasonable, as for a Traveler, that is to stay at his Inn but for a night, to take great Thought and Pains about furnishing and adorning his Chamber, which the next Morning he must leave to the next Comer.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Pain, World, Travel, Soul

“Surely there is a fitness in the institution of the Lord's Supper as a standing memorial by which the church at large may commemorate the grandest act, and by which the heart of each individual believer may be reminded of his dearest friend. You, who have learned to love the Saviour, will prize His ordinance for the Saviour's sake. You who rejoice in the salvation purchased by His dying, will not fail with gratitude and faith to show the Lord's death until He come.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 371.

Love, Death, Faith, Learning

“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

Art, Heart

“Perhaps the most striking difference between Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Tennyson's Idylls of the King is that Malory's women are all human beings, and that Tennyson's are, in greater or less degree, prizes for good conduct.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Women

“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

World

“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?”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

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

Dreams

“Hail, Columbia! happy land!
Hail, ye heroes! heaven-born band!
Who fought and bled in Freedom’s cause,
Who fought and bled in Freedom’s cause,
And when the storm of war was gone,
Enjoyed the peace your valor won.
Let independence be our boast,
Ever mindful what it cost;
Ever grateful for the prize,
Let its altar reach the skies!”

Joseph Hopkinson (1770–1842) United States federal judge

Hail, Columbia! (1798).

War, Happiness, Peace, Freedom

“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.

Men, World

“I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was not just something taking place, but it was a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of Man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men, for communists and capitalists, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative. Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that he died for them? What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“The kindergarten essay got into that underground press we all belong to where something just sort of has a life of its own and moves around and it gets on refrigerators and in the work place and people copy it… I was a minister in the Unitarian church at the time and teaching and I was ready to stop that and do the next phase of my life. So I had quit both those jobs and I was all set up with my studio in Seattle when this other horse came riding by … I'm not a great writer and I'll never get the Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer Prize but I've won the refrigerator door award. And you don't see Faulkner on people's refrigerator.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King

Life, People, Time, Horse

“Home influences alone never saved the New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the day-school of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. His memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pain, Hate, School, Home

“But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2000 Chairman's Letter
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Communication, Learning, Waiting

“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)

Happiness

“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

Life, Women, Men, Way

“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

“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)

“When I heard the news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U. S. forces in Pakistan, I had a lot of questions. And one of the people I wanted to talk to was Lawrence Wright. He's joined us several times on the show. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, which is based in part on more than 500 interviews, including interviews with friends and relatives of bin Laden.”

Lawrence Wright (1947) American writer

[Terry Gross, Lawrence Wright : Bin Laden's Death 'Long In Coming', Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 2, 2011]
About

People, Books, Question, Time

“The other economic camp made for quite a different story. James Tobin (an east-coast Ivy League policy advisor) had already won the Nobel Prize when I spoke with him. A true gentleman, he spoke softly about his life and his Keynesian approach to economics. With due respect, I worried after a time that the interview sounded so automatic, so “done” before, that it would add little to the book. Then I brought up Lucas’s criticism. Tobin began to speak much louder and faster (on transcribing the tape I actually had to adjust the volume). He remained reasonable and gentlemanly but his voice betrayed his indignation toward Lucas and his camp, about how they were misleading sensible Keynesian economic thought.”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Source: Speaking of economics: how to get in the conversation (2007), Ch. 1 : The strangeness of the discipline

Life, Books, Time

“The bare bones of my life are almost unbearable. I was born during the First World War. I spent my adolescence in the Depression, and when I came of age, I was involved in the Second World War. That sounds a pretty horrible series of events. They seem perfectly natural to me. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe. And the Second World War was a wonderful thing to be with. It's now called "the Good War." We usually referred to it as "this damned war."”

Shelby Foote (1916–2005) Novelist, historian

We didn't think of it as a good war. We did believe it was fought in a good cause.
Interview for the Academy of Achievement, 1999

Life, War, People, Age

“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Nobel Banquet Speech

Thinking, Chance

“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

Game, Victory

“The duty on British teas was slight. Americans might have paid the duty without increasing the price of their much prized luxury; ministers might have collected the same duty in England to the advantage of the Exchequer. That Britain should have insisted on this peppercorn in acknowledgement of her right, that America should have refused it in vindication of her liberty, may be taken as a high tribute from two eminently practical peoples to the power of abstract ideas.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

People, Idea, Tea

“You give attention to army, police and things like that. Who pays attention to science? When I got the Dan David prize, which is similar to Nobel and given once in a few years by Israel, nobody talked about it. Nobody asked me anything about it. Nobody even knows and nobody understands it. It is so prestigious in the world of science but why didn’t anyone write about it?”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Scientist wonders why nobody asks him about Dan David prize (2013)

World, Understanding, Science

“I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, Nobel Banquet Speech (1974)

Fear, Fashion

“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

God, Time, Envy, Season

“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

Life, People, Peace, Imagination

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 3
Paper Towns (2008)

Way, Housing, Sea

“A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a biological concept, reflects man’s lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 137.

Money, World, Science

“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?”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

“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)

Death, God, Hope, Error

“James Buchanan … produced several seminal contributions to the literature prior to the appearance of The Calculus, and a continual stream of books and articles afterward. I view Buchanan’s Nobel Prize as a reward for this great body of work, and not just limited to The Calculus. Pursuing this line of reasoning, Gordon Tullock’s prodigious research output following the publication of The Calculus also justifies a Nobel Prize. Indeed, Tullock’s (1967c) seminal analysis of rent seeking, and his subsequent work on this topic might be regarded as sufficient achievements for the awarding of a prize.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Books, Literature, Appearance

“She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work.”

Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) American astronomer

Often said by Hubble about Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

“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.”

James D. Watson book The Double Helix

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)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“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".

Men, People, Mountain, Strong

“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

Peace

“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.

People, Animals

“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.

Books, Age, Imagination, Literature

“I urge all of you today, especially those who are students, to act, to enter the lists of public service and rightly win or lose the prize. For we can have only one form of aristocracy in this country, as Jefferson wrote long ago in rejecting John Adams' suggestion of an artificial aristocracy of wealth and birth. It is, he wrote, the natural aristocracy of character and talent, and the best form of government, he added, was that which selected these men for positions of responsibility.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Men, Birth, Nature, Country

“I feel that over the past 15 years, there has been a steady move toward more populist work. I do feel - and of course I'm completely biased - that this year was a return to the better days of the 80s and early 90s. It was a very good short list and a decent jury; it didn't have any stand-up comedians or media celebs on it, and I think that's what the Man Booker prize should be. There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for [pause] real books.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

14th time lucky (2005)

Books, Feeling, Thinking, Past

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Salon interview (2000)

People, Books, Feeling, Boy

“The claim that women have a stronger average parental urge than men is sometimes viewed as a sexist generalization. But it’s only sexist if we take a dim view of the trait in question: the parental urge. One could turn the accusation on its head: Those who view the evolutionist’s claim (that women are more parental than men) as sexist are actually being sexist themselves, because they’re taking a negative view of a trait that’s usually found more strongly in females than males. They are therefore prizing prototypically masculine traits more highly than prototypically feminine ones.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 230

Women, Men, Question, Parent

“When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied that the Prize was something you could get only once. Whereupon the small girl thought a moment: 'Oh' she said, 'so it's like chicken-pox.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)

Girl, Daughters

“I deplore the decision of the junta in Myanmar to continue the illegal house arrest of Nobel peace prize laureate and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: on the latest conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi

Peace, Democracy, Decision, Housing

“The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom — the freedom we prize — is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.”

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

2000s, 2003, Address to the National Endowment for Democracy (November 2003)

Exercises, History, Nature, Freedom

“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

Love, Men, Pleasure, Beauty

“As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

Happiness, Beauty

“Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger — it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

New York City (p. 260).
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

Way, Idea

“I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion."”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Part 2, 00:35:01
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

People, Religion, Evil, Parting

“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)

Courage

“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.

Happiness, Thinking

“Prize that which is best in the universe; and this is that which useth everything and ordereth everything.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

V, 21
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

Universe

“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

Waiting

“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)

Money

“The network was running a pre-recorded tape of a morning quiz show. The contestants looked vapid, the announcer cheerfully bored, the questions pointless, and the prizes undesirable.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 14 (p. 211).

Question

“The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Way, Thinking

“Go where the others have gone, to the tenebrous limit
for the golden fleece of void, your ultimate prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those turning their backs on and those fallen to dust.”

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) Polish writer

Message of Mr. Cogito.
Quoes

“To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

As quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979), p. 44

Men, World, Law, Sister

“The born leader is a fiction invented by 'born followers'. Leadership is not a gift at birth; it is an award for growing to full moral stature. It is the only prize that a man must win everyday. The prize is the respect of others, earned by the disciplines that generate self-respect.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

The Cadence (2009), yearbook of Hargrave Military Academy, p. F

Birth

“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7

Literature

“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)

Life, Money, Children, People

“Nor, though surrounded by such men, did the youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an age when most of those who distinguish themselves in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships at college, he had won for himself a conspicuous place in Parliament. No advantage of fortune or connection was wanting that could set off to the height his splendid talents and his unblemished honour. At twenty-three he had been thought worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who appeared as the delegates of the British Commons, at the bar of the British nobility. All who stood at that bar, save him alone, are gone, culprit, advocates, accusers. To the generation which is now in the vigour of life, he is the sole representative of a great age which has passed away. But those who, within the last ten years, have listened with delight, till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords, to the lofty and animated eloquence of Charles Earl Grey, are able to form some estimate of the powers of a race of men among whom he was not the foremost.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘ Warren Hastings http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/hastings/txt_complete.html’, Edinburgh Review LXXIV (October, 1841), pp. 160–255. About

Life, Men, Age, Appearance

“Fawning ambition so plainly expressed in the classroom was quite another matter. It wasn’t that I got A’s; other boys got A’s. It was that I wanted my A’s so badly and sought them so blatantly—that’s what everyone saw. Nixon: “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school, not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my more gifted colleagues.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

School, Boy

“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)

Law, Heart

“I humbly accept the Centennial Nobel Peace Prize. Forty years ago today, the Prize for 1961 was awarded for the first time to a Secretary-General of the United Nations — posthumously, because Dag Hammarskjöld had already given his life for peace in Central Africa. And on the same day, the Prize for 1960 was awarded for the first time to an African — Albert Luthuli, one of the earliest leaders of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. For me, as a young African beginning his career in the United Nations a few months later, those two men set a standard that I have sought to follow throughout my working life.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Nobel lecture (2001)

Life, Men, Peace, Time

“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

“You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun the understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of then to realize you'd been had, that there aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 21

Understanding

“Sweden is the country a good reputation in the world around us. It is something that the Queen and I often experience during our state visit. Both the country and the people are perceived very positively. Our services and products are something we should be proud of. Sweden respected as a nation and it is with pleasure and pride that I represent our country. For example, noted Nobel Prize much and it helps to show up Sweden as a nation that promotes education and science.”

Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (1946) King of Sweden

royalcorrespondent.com http://royalcorrespondent.com/2013/02/15/an-interview-with-his-majesty-king-carl-xvi-gustaf-of-sweden/

People, Pleasure, World, Education

“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)

Game, Time, Dead

“There's just one thing that's permanent in this world, and that's change. And when a man gets too old to change, why, then, he dies. And after that, who knows? Do we go on somewhere else? We'd all like to think so; it seems sometimes as though something inside us was telling us that we do. But if we do live on, then one thing is sure: The fellows who are afraid all the time that they may lose what they've got will lose out over there just the way they lose out here. And the big prizes will keep right on going to the fellows who do their duty and have faith. That's all there is to happiness, according to my way of thinking—just doing your duty and having faith.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Interview with Bruce Barton, "It Would Be Fun To Start Over Again," The American Magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=CspZAAAAYAAJ&dq=Henry%20Ford%20Bruce%20Barton%20american%20Magazine&pg=RA3-PA7#v=onepage&q=Henry%20Ford%20Bruce%20Barton%20american%20Magazine&f=false, April 1921

Happiness, World, Faith, Way

“.. 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

Fight

“One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Star Wars," p. 714.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Beauty, Dreams, Feeling, History

Quotes about prize page 2

Quotes about prize
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