Quotes about someone
page 23

“"What makes you think that Valentine's change of plans had anything to do with your brother?"
"Because only Jace can piss someone off that much."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Luke and Clary, pg. 325
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Thinking, Change

“The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: Maybe, Maybe Not

Love, Heart

“Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Lovers, Understanding

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”

Kathy Acker book Blood and Guts in High School

Source: Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

Love

“Keep your chin up. Eventually, you will meet someone who cares about your opinion. I'm so sorry I'm not her.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

“… you don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Bookends

Waiting, Future

“We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Source: The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life's Most Difficult Problems

People

“A friend of mine once defined love as finding someone you can talk to late into the night”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Love, Night

“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“I have not stopped loving her, nor my parabatai; love does not stop when someone dies.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Love

“A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.”

Tana French book Faithful Place

Source: Faithful Place

Way, Girl, Personality

“They spent days, nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Idea, Night

“I love you: You imagine hearing the words from someone not related to you, someone not your best friend, but when someone you love, someone you dream about, actually says them, it makes your body melt and your breath get caught in your chest.”

Sarah Mlynowski (1977) Novelist

Source: Ten Things We Did

Love, Dreams, Imagination

“Perfect Day:
It was a day filled with the glow of ordinary things & we passed them quietly from hand to hand for a long time & someone said she had picked a perfect day to be born & I think all of us felt the same.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Thinking, Time, Perfection

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

Tana French book The Likeness

Source: The Likeness

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

11 December 1852
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

World, Idea

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Books, Way

“He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

Love, Memory, Hurt

“Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air round him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone ho loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Saving Raphael Santiago

Love, Hope, Hurt, Madness

“Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?"
"Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: CryoBurn

Revenge

“All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.”

E.M. Forster book Where Angels Fear to Tread

Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Life, Education, Behavior, Parent

“Faith, it is said, is better than belief, because belief is when someone else does the thinking.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Faith, Thinking

“I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.”

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) British writer

Love, Children, Cry

“If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you'll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph (2011)
Context: What we aim to do is calm the spirit and get in touch with the source from which everything comes, removing any trace of malice or egotism. If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you’ll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.

Soul, Time, Forgetting

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work

“It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Girl, Chance

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

World

“Having someone who understands is a great blessing for ourselves. Being someone who understands is a great blessing to others.”

Janette Oke (1935) Canadian writer

Understanding

“So why would I want someone to be my everything when one day they might not be around?”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

“I am the kind of person who, if my feelings are unrequited, can completely detach from someone emotionally if I simply put my mind to it.”

Mindy Kaling book Why Not Me?

Source: Why Not Me?

Feeling, Personality

“How do you know, poor fool? Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence'; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe.”

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) Italian scholar and poet

Source: Petrarch: The Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta

Fools, Soul

“tiny: did someone die?
me: yeah, i did.
he smiles again at that.
tiny: well, then… welcome to the afterlife.”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Smile

“I envied it; not the idea of having so much money that you could throw it away, but the thought of growing up in a world where someone cared so much about your happiness and so little about what you accomplished in life.”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Life, Money, Happiness, World

“There can be no real peace when living with someone who has already declared war, no peace but capitulation. And even that, as we see around us, doesn't lead to further peace but to further degradation and exploitation. We're responsible for not only what we do but for what is in our power to stop. Before we can speak of peace, we have to speak honestly of stopping, by any and all means possible, those who have declared war on the world and on us. Those who destroy wont stop because we ask nicely. There is only one language that they understand, and everyone here knows what it is. Yet we don't speak of it openly.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

War, World, Peace, Understanding

“Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway.”

Rutger Bregman (1988) Dutch journalist, writer and historian

"No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there"

Thinking, Time, Wealth

“Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 8, pp. 224

Life, Spring, Bird, Sleep

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)

Life, World, Feeling, Reality

“When you open a door for others to have an opinion on your relationship, it can be dangerous. Find what you need, not what everyone else wants for you. Women have been taught that in order to have a place in the world, an identity, they must marry and have children. If that's the life you truly want, great. But for many women, marriage is only about needing the world to know that someone desires them enough to say, "Here's a contract to prove that I love you and will commit to you for the rest of my life."”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

For these women, no contract equals no validation — and, thus, no reason for existing.
O interview (2003)

Love, Life, Women, Marriage

“Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [ Was that sufficiently incendiary?]”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1992Jan10.201804.11926@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

School

“I'd had a long talk with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career. He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent. He said that after a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end.
Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Phlogiston interview (1995)

Money, Way, Feeling, Drink

“When someone speaks from the heart, one should listen to them”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

Mother’s Love – Swami Ishanananda http://www.chennaimath.org/category/media/page/2,

Heart

“I hope you never need no one,
Hope you treasure your independence.
I hope you never fall in love
With someone like you.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Hope You Never
Lyrics, Songs and Music from "She's the One" (1996)

Love, Hope

“Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding (1976) in John T. Partington, Terry Orlick, John H. Salmela (1982) Sport in perspective. p. 94
1970s

Books, Knowledge

“"We've had death threats", Pete says, "saying, 'You're evil and your days are numbered." What was it, "Don't panic but be scared". Someone shat on our doorstep once and nailed a sparrow to our basement door. I don't mind, me. I'll out-weird any stalker.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

On the downside of fame, NME (New Musical Express), March 13, 2004
People

Death, Evil

“Just as the Bible teaches the Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” — the Mahabharata (5.39.57), predating the Bible, teaches a similar truth, and in almost the exact same wording. Yogis and spiritual adepts in India extend the teaching to its logical limits, showing kindness to all species of life — and this, of course, means vegetarianism. It is hard to be kind to animals if you are eating them. In other words, if you don't want someone eating your entrails, don't eat the entrails of others.”

Steven J. Rosen (1955) American editor, author on Vaishnavism

“The New Carnivores”, in The Agni and the Ecstasy (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 100 https://books.google.it/books?id=fYjX7W6SCLMC&pg=PA100.

Life, Truth, Animals

“In boxing, the style has changed over the years from crouching to being more and more vertical. Also people used to jump around, but the modern boxer like Tyson just moves in flat footed to demolish his opponent in a scientific way. In Wing Chun a person does not bob as in boxing. When two beginners fight it doesn't matter how they fight, but against professionals it makes a difference. Even a smaller [person] is better off to keep the body vertical and step back, then to bob and weave. This is because the hand can move faster than the body. Boxing is still like a game because there are rules for how you can hit and how you can't hit. If you attack someone and they bend their head, then in Wing Chun you can still hit them with your hand even without pulling your hand back.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Boxing Source: Comments From Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting, by Ray Van Raamsdonk http://www.springtimesong.com/wcqanda.htm

People, Way, Game, Change

“At first it was for health and athletic performance but it also became about ethics and the environment. My strength increased. I put 20lbs on my dumbell benchpress (10lbs each arm) in only 2 weeks and my endurance improved. Running is much easier now. I have more energy and recovery is better too. The whole protein myth is complete nonsense. Plant-based foods have plenty. … As an athlete you want your endothelium, the inner lining of your arteries, to be as healthy as possible. It is responsible for nitric oxide production which transports oxygen to the muscles and dilates the arteries. More oxygen means better performance whether it be strength or endurance. Plant-based foods are inherently loaded with antioxidants too, which aid athletes in recovery. If someone wants to be the best athlete they can be they need to fuel their body with the best diet available and that is a whole food, plant-based diet.”

James Wilks (1978) English martial artist

“James Wilks,” interview with Great Vegan Athletes (2013) http://www.greatveganathletes.com/content/james-wilks.

Health, Food

“Being misunderstood by someone is vexation. Being misunderstood by everyone is tragedy.”

Liu Shahe (1931–2019) Chinese writer and poet

Encarta http://encarta.msn.com/quote_561556245/Understanding_Being_misunderstood_by_someone_is_vexation.html

“There, look this always happens when someone is freed by force of arms! How fine it would have been if Macedonia could have freed herself! But now it's happened, our duty is to fight alongside Bulgaria, and for Bulgaria.”

Yane Sandanski (1872–1915) Bulgarian revolutionary

Attributed to Sandanski (May 1913) by the Russian journalist Viktorov-Toparov; as cited in: macedoniantruth.org http://www.macedoniantruth.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2005&page=5, Old 11-14-2011.

Fight

“If you hold two arms out in front of you and someone grabs them, then you can use the third set elbow movement to escape. Bring the hand right in to touch the body. If the hand is held in a fist, it doesn't work. Then press down with the elbow.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung Comments on How to Respond to a Grab Standing Grappling Situations Source: Comments From Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting, by Ray Van Raamsdonk http://www.springtimesong.com/wcqanda.htm

“Sometimes you run away by yourself purely so someone who cares will come to find you. Half the time nobody does. That's the tragedy of life.”

Lindsey Davis book The Ides of April

The Ides of April

Life, Time

“I always feel I have to take a stand,
And there's always someone on hand
To hate me for standing there.
I always feel I have to open my mouth,
And every time I do, I offend someone, somewhere.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

What If No One's Watching
Song lyrics

Hate, Feeling, Time

“I was flabbergasted. How could it be that someone found evidence convincing but was still not convinced? The answer, of course, was that his religion had immunized him against my evidence.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. xv

Religion

“Niven made a name for himself as a hard SF author, which is to say, someone whose SF provides enough technical detail that the reader can be certain that various mechanisms and events couldn't work the way the author has them working.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

review of All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/remember-when-niven-was-fun, 2015 2010s

Way

“To assume someone because of their age or gender, that they don't pose a threat, would be wrong.”

Sean Spicer (1971) American political strategist and former White House Press Secretary and Communications Director for President…

' White House Tells Dissenters in State Department: 'Get With the Program' or Quit http://time.com/4653958/white-house-dissent-state-department-response/', Time, January 30 2017 (defending the detention of a five year old child)

Age

“Someone once said that history is written by the victors. He probably was not the greatest of all victors, if only because his name has been utterly forgotten.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the Norman conquest of England; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

History

“The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Sleigh, Tom. "Robert Pinsky", ‘’BOMB Magazine’’ Summer, 1998. .
Other

Love, Sense, Reading

“I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Medium Raw (2010)

World, Sleep

“[On her fallout with Abhishek Bachchan] The truth is if someone chooses not to invite you to their wedding you realize where you stand with that person. You may be deluded and think you are friends but maybe that friendship was only extended as co-stars on the sets. It doesn't matter. It became very clear to me that we were only co-stars not friends.”

Rani Mukerji (1978) Indian film actress

citation needed
Famous Quotes

Friendship, Truth, Star, Thinking

“The United States was taxed with following a policy whose logic was "genocide" for helping South Vietnam deal with "a peasant-based insurrection led by Communists" while the genuinely genocidal practices of North Vietnam in liquidating whole categories of the population were not mentioned. On his visit to Hanoi, Chomsky publicly held North Vietnam up to the world as a model of social justice and freedom. Whenever Chomsky and those who repeated some of his absurd views were challenged, they often cited as their authority someone else who had uttered similar absurdities, as if this vindicated the point they were making.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

World, Justice, Freedom, Help

“Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?”

Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama

Glamorama (1998)

Photo, Hell

“While mental disturbances may provide individuals with an underlying sense of unease that seems necessary for sustained creative activity, these disturbances are not the only source for inner tension… chronic physical ailments may give someone a heightened sense of urgency to leave a mark on the world and achieve immortality through creative greatness.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy (1995)

World, Sense

“The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Baby

“The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so – this is the view of Christianity – then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 10
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

Life, Literature, Idea, Memory

“When someone is giving you his opinion, you should receive it with deep gratitude even though it is worthless. If you don't, he will not tell you the things that he has seen and heard about you again. It is best to both give and receive opinions in a friendly way.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Way, Gratitude

“You women could make someone fall in love even with a lie.”

Georg Büchner Danton's Death

Act I.
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)

Love, Women, Lie

“It is not a matter of competing with someone else. Essentially, it is accepting our own special abilities as special – and then developing them.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 159

“Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Sense, Suffering, Housing

“If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shattering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it impossible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought suggests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Life, People, Books, Fashion

“One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

Dreams, Laughter

“If you can get someone to laugh with you, they will be more willing to identify with you, listen to you. It parts the waters.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Susan Feeney (March 24, 1990) "It's no joke: politicians pay to get those laughs", The Dallas Morning News, p. 1C.

Water, Parting

“It seemed that if someone was lost in Copenhagen then the citizens regarded it as their duty to offer help.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 78
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Prey (2001)

Help

“Here's the clear "science:"When the male sperm and female egg join, a new and unique life form is created. At conception. Not at birth or viability, or when a lawyer says so. At conception this happens. John McCain got it right; Obama pled less scientific knowledge than a 5th grader.This life is either human or something else. Science irrefutably would declare that the life which is starting from that moment is human. It's not a stalk of broccoli, it's not a parrot, squirrel, or dolphin. It will never become a tree—it can only become a human. It has the entire DNA schedule that it will have for the rest of its life right then. In days it will begin to take on increasingly observable human characteristics and form, but at conception, it is biologically human.If this life is human, then the only issue left is whether this human life falls under the notion that it has a fundamental right of existence or not. If not, it is because we as a culture have decided that some human lives are simply not worth living. If we can decide that about an innocent and unborn baby, we can also decide it on the basis of less absolute criteria than that. If we make that choice (and this is all about "CHOICE," isn’t it?) then someone may decide that a terminally ill person is not a life worth living. Maybe a severely disabled child is a life not worth living; what about a person with a limited IQ? Say that's absurd—that an educated and enlightened society would never be so audacious as to begin to terminate life based on such arbitrary excuses? Maybe you haven't studied Nazi Germany, in which the murder of six million Jews was justified because of their religion and millions of others were murdered because of their politics. Germany was not a primitive, superstitious culture. It was one filled with the intelligentsia and enlightened.This is an important issue. It's why we can't trust Obama with America's future because he's not even sure which Americans are worth saving and which ones aren't. And it's why that for many of us, McCain's selection of a running mate really does matter. Because John McCain clearly is pro life, I will support and vote for him because Obama is not an option for me as a pro life person. I will be disappointed if McCain doesn't pick a true pro life person and realize that should that happen, he will lose many of the very people who supported me. I cannot expect all of you to vote for McCain if he chooses someone whose record isn't pro life. It will be a less than perfect decision for all of us—our only real choices are McCain and Obama; one will protect life and one won't. Some will argue for a 3rd party candidate and I respect that, but in political realities, that is essentially a vote for Obama and I can't go there.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

A Message from the Governor
HuckPAC
2008-08-23
http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=1848&CommentPage=5
2011-03-01

Life, People, Education, Religion

“First of all, let us try to know what love is. If love means to possess someone or something, then that is not real love, not pure love. If loves means to give oneself, to become one with everything and everyone, then that is real love. Real love is total oneness with the object loved and with the Possessor of love.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

Rainbow-Flowers (1973)

Love

“Last night at the bar someone asked me to say something 'hot and sexy'. All I could think of on the fly was 'Hayden Christensen.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

7 September 2010
Twitter

Thinking, Flying, Night

“The Donkey whispered in His ear:
"Child, in thirty-some-odd years,
You'll ride someone that looks like me (untriumphantly)."”

Aaron Weiss

A Stick, a Carrot and String.
It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright (2009)

“We took portable showers, Pampers and clothes for kids [in a Hurricane Katrina shelter]. I sang for them and played the guitar... At least for a little while, they saw that someone wasn't forgetting them. It lifted their spirits, and I knew they were a little more comfortable when we left.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

greenbaypressgazette.com (October 5, 2005)
2007, 2008

Clothes, Forgetting

“"How can a movie be "one of the best"? There's only one "best" movie, so saying something is "one of the best" is stupid and doesn't make sense. Technically any movie that's not the worst could be considered "one of the best." Imagine that, another empty phrase used by marketing people. I want to punch someone in the throat."”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Hollywood: still out of ideas? How about another black-guy-meets-white-guy comedy http://maddox.xmission.com/cop_movie.html The Best Page in the Universe

People, Stupidity, Imagination, Sense

“Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.”

Neil Strauss book The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships (2015)

Love

“… the single most important activist thing we could do is invent a good vegan cheese. If someone’s receptive to veganism, but they don’t feel like they can do it, it always is, “But I love how this or that tastes!” And it seems like as much as they’ll agree with you about the ethical arguments, their own taste preferences win out.”

Isa Chandra Moskowitz (1973) American food writer

" Isa Chandra Moskowitz: The vegan ambassador http://www.culinate.com/articles/the_culinate_interview/isa_chandra_moskowitz". Interview by Ben Grossblatt for Culinate, July 3, 2007

Love, Feeling

“In the evening, as I was going to bed, I saw him come into my room.
"I would not have come," he told me, "and interrupt your rest unless I believed that someone who could travel nine hundred leagues in half a day could have done so without getting tired. You don't know of the fine argument I've been having about you with our Jesuit priests?" he added. "They insist you are a magician. The best you can hope for from them is to pass only for an impostor."”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Hope, Travel

“Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) German philosopher

Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 102 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA102

Understanding

“This topic is personal for me; it’s not just academic. If someone says that the Bible is a myth and is not true, or that the doctrine of evolution is true, and the Genesis account of creation is false, they are attacking the very foundation of my faith.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Faith, Personality, Falseness

“I believe that we cannot survive as a democratic country when we are supporting someone like Thieu in Saigon, who has put 300,000 political prisoners in jail because they've spoken in favor of peace. I just don't believe that when a Republican Party bugs the Democratic Party headquarters, that that smacks of democracy. These kind of things I speak out against. That doesn't mean I'm a Communist.”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

Interview by Phil Donahue (1972)

Peace, Democracy, Support, Country

“We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?”

George Lakoff (1941) American linguist

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987)

Anger

“Paranoia speaks to a deeper drive than fear. Paranoia is a defiant charge to a cold, unfeeling cosmos: “Hear me! I exist! I’m important!” Because after all, if someone is actually orchestrating the chaos of the universe against you personally, then you do matter. When no one seems to care anymore, at least “enemies” give you the comforting illusion that you count.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 1 “Operation: Cooperation!” (p. 31)

Fear, Universe, Personality

“My dear Duret, I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him heart-broken and completely on the rocks. He asked me to find him someone who would take from ten to twenty of his paintings at their choice, for 111 fr. apiece. Shall we do it between us, making 500 fr. each? Naturally, no one, least of all he, must know that it is we who are doing it..”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Quote from Manet's letter to the Paris' art-critic Théodore Duret, 1875, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 121
1850 - 1875

Nature, Heart, Painting

“Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 149
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“I'm a very lucky guy. I had so many people help me over the years that I never had many problems. If I had a problem, I could sit down with someone and they would explain the problem to me, and the problem become like a baseball game. You're at home plate now, how do you get to first? How do you get to second? How do you get to third? When you get back to home, your problem is solved. That's the way I view the business world, I view it as a baseball game. Once you start thinking the way you've been taught to think over so many years, you have no problems.”

Willie Mays (1931) Baseball player

Academy of Achievement Interview (1996)

People, World, Way, Guy

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Wisdom, God, Law

“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”

Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970) American Christian radical

[The Book of Ammon, 1965, Hennacy, 31]

“A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.”

G. Gordon Liddy (1930) American lawyer in Watergate scandal

As quoted in "The Best Of The Rest: 20 More Quotes About Liberals" at Right Wing News (24 November 2010) http://rightwingnews.com/quotes/the-best-of-the-rest-20-more-quotes-about-liberals/

Money, Feeling

“I like looking at the characters. Seeing them always brings up some voice or attitude. I am much more visual and that works so much better than having someone tell me what the character is all about”

Frank Welker (1946) American actor

Frank Welker Q&A http://www.ign.com/articles/2009/09/16/frank-welker-qa (September 15, 2009)

“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

“I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who belives in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be facist.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Conversations with Derek Walcott (University Press Mississippi, 1996, page.165)

World, Democracy, Idea

“My first encounter with the concept of "information service" came with the reading of The Social Function of Science by Desmond Bernal, first published in 1939-a work that stimulated a whole generation of young scientists to think about the role of science in society, its organisation, its future. In it, he wrote that in every laboratory "there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found." Such a person "would have to be chosen partly for his comprehensive scientific interests, which need to be much greater than those of the other laboratory workers, and partly for his inclination to systematic thinking." Already I felt that I might be suited to such a role.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 4.

Literature, Thinking, Science, Loss

“They're also surprised I'm only 6 feet tall. They expect someone much bigger. They say I'm younger and prettier in person, which I like.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

On Xena fans' impression of Lawless when they encounter her in person — reported in Larry Bonko (March 10, 1997) "Hero Worship: Hercules. Xena. They're Tough. They're Sexy. And in the World of TV Syndication, They're Muscling Out the Competition", The Virginian-Pilot, p. E1.

Personality

“Not only the artist but everyone "becomes someone else" in becoming someone. One is thought about, thus invented. Or as Steinberg put it with memorable succinctness in his Cogito drawings, "I think, therefore Descartes is." One creates not oneself but another. Being is in the act.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 196, "Saul Steinberg"

Thinking, Drawing