Quotes about something
page 56

William Saroyan photo
Jeb Bush photo
Douglas Adams photo

“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure game (1985), published by Infocom.

Camille Paglia photo
George F. Kennan photo
Nastassja Kinski photo

“I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. My philosophy is to stay as close as possible to what's happening. If I can't solve something, how the hell can I expect my managers to?”

Harold Geneen (1910–1997) American businessman

from an interview for an article in The New York Times (1977), as cited in " Harold S. Geneen, 87, Dies; Nurtured AT&T http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/23/business/harold-s-geneen-87-dies-nurtured-itt.html?pagewanted=all" published 23 November 1997 in The New York Times.

“One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.”

Norman Maclean (1902–1990) American author and scholar

"A River Runs Through It", p. 68
A River Runs Through It (1976)

Aron Ra photo
Jacques Lacan photo
Jim Morrison photo

“I think, in these days, especially in the States, you have to be a politician or an assassin or something, to really be a superstar.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

As quoted in When You're Strange (2009) by Tom Dicillo

Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Sherilyn Fenn photo
Fred Shero photo

“I swear I have never told a player to attack another player. In fact, I have told my players if they ever hear me saying something like this, they can break a stick over my skull. I ask only that they play aggressively.”

Fred Shero (1925–1990) Former ice hockey player and coach

HHOF Time Capsule - The 70s - Great Teams - Philadelphia Flyers - 1973-74 to 1975-76, Hockey Hall of Fame, 2009-05-27 http://www.hhof.com/html/t7gt04.shtml,

Erwin Schrödinger photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Clive Barker photo
Halldór Laxness photo

“It may well be that fighting is normal, like having something to eat. Peace, on the other hand, is a luxury.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Ólafur
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

David Morrison photo
John Glenn photo

“To me, there is no greater calling … If I can inspire young people to dedicate themselves to the good of mankind, I've accomplished something.”

John Glenn (1921–2016) American astronaut and politician

On inspiring others to public service, as quoted in "John Glenn had the stuff U.S. heroes are made of http://enquirer.com/editions/2002/02/20/loc_john_glenn_had_stuff.html" by Howard Wilkinson, in The Cincinnati Enquirer (20 February 2002).

Richard Dawkins photo

“There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.”

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

Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

Maneka Gandhi photo

“I mean, winning an election is no big deal. It's what you do with the power afterward that matters. And, well, for me anyway, it's proving you can do something entirely on your own, entirely your own way and for a commitment that is larger than yourself.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

After being elected in 1989, as quoted in Gandhi Family Rebel Charts a New Role in India's Politics http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-01/news/vw-315_1_maneka-gandhi, Los Angeles Times (1 December 1989)
1981-1990

Noam Chomsky photo
Hilaire Belloc photo

“[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse”

"Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse, and Was Eaten by a Lion"
Cautionary Tales for Children (1907)

Calvin Coolidge photo
Louis C.K. photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Dean Kamen photo

“Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?”

Dean Kamen (1951) American businessman

Iconoclasts: Isabella Rosselini & Dean Kamen (2006)

Clint Eastwood photo

“Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

In the first part, Eastwood was reportedly quoting a favored instruction from acting coach Jack Kosslyn.
p. 112.
Clint: The Life and Legend (1999)

Susan Cooper photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Kris Roe photo

“I don't want to love you, but it's something that I love to do.”

Kris Roe (1978) American composer and singer

Bite My Tongue
Song lyrics, Anywhere but Here (1997)

George Will photo

“Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, March 14, 2014, "Democrats are making income inequality worse" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-democrats-policies-make-income-inequality-worse/2014/03/14/97d5074e-aada-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html at washingtonpost.com
2010s

Karl Pilkington photo

“I've never understood what pole dancing's about anyway. It's a waste of a good skill. Get into scaffolding or something.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Moaning of Life, General Quotes

George W. Bush photo

“…Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they're going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.”

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

The President's reasoning for telling reporters in the Oval Office that the current Defense Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, would be staying on, although Bush had already selected potential replacements. Given at a news conference http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/11/20061108-2.html (November 8, 2006)
2000s, 2006

Sri Aurobindo photo

“The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation…. The terror of destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1950 (From a Postcript Chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity.)
India's Rebirth

Gottfried Leibniz photo

“I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Letter 11 to Grimarest: Passages Concerning the Abbe de St. Pierre's 'Project for Perpetual Peace (June 1712). Taken from Leibniz: Political Writings (2nd Edition, 1988), Edited by Patrick Riley.

Miracle Davis photo

“If you want something, fake it til you make it. You need to say it like it's there.”

Miracle Davis (1991) American actress and writer

During one of her videos on youtube Fake it til you make it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upuL1FKXi0k

Shamini Flint photo
Carly Fiorina photo

“When I think of something that really is me, that I'm proud of, is honestly, I would have to say, I've never sold my soul along the way… All those things, you're selling your soul, and I don't think I have.”

Carly Fiorina (1954) American corporate executive and politician

David Webb Show http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/05/ohio-male-rnc-member-calls-carly-fiorina-hot-babe/ (5 August 2015).
2010s, 2015, David Webb Show (August 2015)

“Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Introduction
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Phillip Guston photo
Frank Klepacki photo
Jack London photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Bill Bryson photo
Graham Greene photo
M. S. Subbulakshmi photo

“Indian music is oriented solely to the end of divine communication. If I have done something in this respect entirely due to the grace of the Almighty who has chosen my humble self as a tool.”

M. S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) singer,Carnatic vocalist

Quoted in Ode to a Nightingale.[Sarada, M., The Complete Guide to Functional Writing in English, http://books.google.com/books?id=R--f51qlYrkC&pg=PA11, 1 October 2005, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 978-81-207-2923-0, 11–12]

Ann Richards photo
Colin Wilson photo
Dave Eggers photo
Tom Petty photo
Colin Meloy photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Nastassja Kinski photo
Bill Bryson photo

“Well, I didn't ever think about Australia much. To me Australia had never been very interesting, it was just something that happened in the background. It was Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee movies and things that never really registered with me and I didn't pay any attention to it at all. I went out there in 1992, as I was invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I got there and realised almost immediately that this was a really really interesting country and I knew absolutely nothing about it. As I say in the book, the thing that really struck me was that they had this prime minister who disappeared in 1967, Harold Holt and I had never heard about this. I should perhaps tell you because a lot of other people haven't either. In 1967 Harold Holt was prime minister and he was walking along a beach in Victoria just before Christmas and decided impulsively to go for a swim and dove into the water and swam about 100 feet out and vanished underneath the waves, presumably pulled under by the ferocious undertow or rips as they are called, that are a feature of so much of the Australian coastline. In any case, his body was never found. Two things about that amazed me. The first is that a country could just lose a prime minister — that struck me as a really quite special thing to do — and the second was that I had never heard of this. I could not recall ever having heard of this. I was sixteen years old in 1967. I should have known about it and I just realised that there were all these things about Australia that I had never heard about that were actually very very interesting. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it is a fascinating place. The thing that really endeared Australia to me about Harold Holt's disappearance was not his tragic drowning, but when I learned that about a year after he disappeared the City of Melbourne, his home town, decided to commemorate him in some appropriate way and named a municipal swimming pool after him. I just thought: this is a great country.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The pool was under construction before he disappeared and is located in the electorate he represented.
Interview with Stanford's Newsletter (June 2001)

André Breton photo
Tim Cook photo
Donald Ervin Knuth photo
Alex Salmond photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo

“To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.”

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

D 96
Variant translation: To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

Anish Kapoor photo

“I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

Gracie Allen photo

“A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 7 : Buying a good used platform

Robert Craft photo

“If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality.”

Robert Craft (1923–2015) American conductor and writer

Down a Path of Wonder (2006)

Steve Jobs photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“You've got half the room going totally crazy, wild, they loved everything, they wanna do something great for our country, and you have the other side, even on positive news, really positive news, like that, they were like death, and un-American, un-American. Somebody said treasonous, I mean, yeah I guess, why not? Can we call that treason, why not?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speaking in Cincinnati about Democrats did not clap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjwPiE1wCU0 during his State of the Union Address (5 February 2018)
2010s, 2018, February

Salma Hayek photo

“Everyone said how tormented directors can be. I've never enjoyed something so much in my life!”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

O interview (2003)

Ken Ham photo
Joseph Beuys photo
Derren Brown photo

“The Barnum Statements are very famous and well known about and there’s a great experiment… There’s a terrific experiment that was done on this with students. I’ve filmed this myself. We did it with three different groups of people across the world, where you have… everybody in the group is given a reading, a personality reading. Normally beforehand there’s some nonsense about asking for their birth date or getting some objects off them - so there’s some sort of process apparently involved - and they’re given a reading. And it’s a long reading, it’s a very detailed personality reading and they all get one individually, they’re all asked to read it and, invariably, they will all say afterwards that it’s very, very accurate, that it was not at all vague or ambiguous or what people might expect and they’ll give it 85, 90, 95 percent accuracy. I’ve seen this happen and people are amazed by it. And then you get them to swap with each other and say “perhaps you can identify someone else by their reading”. Then they realise they’ve all been given exactly the same thing which was written months ago before I even met them and the statements that fill those sorts of readings are generally Barnum Statements. Barnum statements are things which essentially apply to anybody – this is only part of the cold-reading skill but it’s a major part of it… PT Barnum… “something for everyone” and, famously “a sucker is born every minute””

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Joe Hill photo

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"The Preacher and the Slave" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Preacher_and_the_Slave (1911)

Norman Angell photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Charlie Sifford photo

“I don't smile much, and I never laugh. It's just something that's in me. If you'd been through what I've been through, you wouldn't be smiling, either.”

Charlie Sifford (1922–2015) professional golfer

Sifford during an interview with Golf Digest, see My Shot: Dr. Charlie Sifford https://www.golfdigest.com/story/myshot_gd0612
Also see Obama calls black golf trailblazer Sifford a 'legend https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-golf-sifford/obama-calls-black-golf-trailblazer-sifford-a-legend-idUKKBN0L82J720150204 by Reuters

John Hirst photo
Stephen Crane photo
Isa Genzken photo
Fali Sam Nariman photo

“When I had the honour of his conversation, I endeavoured to learn his thoughts upon mathematical subjects, and something historical concerning his inventions, that I had not been before acquainted with. I found, he had read fewer of the modern mathematicians, than one could have expected; but his own prodigious invention readily supplied him with what he might have an occasion for in the pursuit of any subject he undertook. I have often heard him censure the handling geometrical subjects by algebraic calculations; and his book of Algebra he called by the name of Universal Arithmetic, in opposition to the injudicious title of Geometry, which Des Cartes had given to the treatise, wherein he shews, how the geometer may assist his invention by such kind of computations. He frequently praised Slusius, Barrow and Huygens for not being influenced by the false taste, which then began to prevail. He used to commend the laudable attempt of Hugo de Omerique to restore the ancient analysis, and very much esteemed Apollonius's book De sectione rationis for giving us a clearer notion of that analysis than we had before.”

Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) British doctor

Preface; The bold passage is subject of the 1809 article " Remarks on a Passage in Castillione's Life' of Sir Isaac Newton http://books.google.com/books?id=BS1WAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA519." By John Winthrop, in: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, from Their Commencement, in 1665, to the Year 1800: 1770-1776: 1770-1776. Charles Hutton et al. eds. (1809) p. 519.
Preface to View of Newton's Philosophy, (1728)

Elaine Paige photo

“I loved it. We would rehearse in this dark theatre, unaware of the sunny day outside, and be immersed in the magic of creating something from our imaginations.”

Elaine Paige (1948) English singer and actress

Regarding The Roar Of The Greasepaint - The Smell Of The Crowd
Rock and pop (2006)

Patrick Stump photo
Willem de Kooning photo

“I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Willem de Kooning (1969) by Thomas B. Hess, Content Is A Glimpse, excerpts from an interview with David Sylvester, (BBC), Location, vol.1 no.1 Spring 1963.
1960's

Gillian Anderson photo
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo

“… that new spirit which is passing from municipal into Imperial politics, which aims more at the improvement of the lot of the worker and the toiler than at those great constitutional effects in which past Parliaments have taken as their pride… It is all very well to make great speeches and to win great divisions. It is well to speak with authority in the councils of the world and to see your navies riding on every sea, and to see your flag on every shore. That is well, but it is not all. I am certain that there is a party in this country not named as yet that is disconnected with any existing political organization, a party which is inclined to say, "A plague on both your Houses, a plague on all your parties, a plague on all your politics, a plague on your ending discussions which yield so little fruit." (Cheers.) "Have done with this unending talk and come down and do something for the people." It is this spirit which animates, as I believe, the great masses of our artisans, the great masses of our working clergy, the great masses of those who work for and with the poor, and who for the want of a better word I am compelled to call by the bastard term of philanthropists.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Speech to a meeting at St James's Hall on behalf of the Progressive majority in the London County Council (21 March 1894), reported in The Times (22 March 1894), p. 7.

Ron White photo
Otto Lilienthal photo

“To design a flying machine is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

Widely attributed to Lilienthal, this was actually an 1898 statement by Ferdinand Ferber dedicated to Lilienthal, published in L'Aviation; ses debuts son developpement [Aviation, its debut and devopment] (1908), translated into German as Die Kunst zu Fliegen [The Art of Flight] (1910).
Misattributed

M.I.A. photo

“Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://niralimagazine.com/2004/10/not-so-missing-in-action/ with Nirali magazine (October 2004)
Sourced quotes

John F. Kennedy photo
John Allen Fraser photo