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Alexander McCall Smith

"We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain."

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"We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain."

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A.E. Samaan

"We must stop expecting the government to play the role of national transformation why we sit down and watch."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The public thinks big, sensible, measured thoughts while people run around doing silly things."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"It takes all sorts of people to make a world, as I've often heard, but I think there are some who could be spared,' Anne told her reflection in the east gable mirror that night."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Most peoples are prisoners of other people's thoughts."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?"

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary."

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Alexander McCall Smith
"We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain."

Society

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."

Observation

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun."

Lifestyle

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Alexander McCall Smith
"When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about."

Life

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause."

Ethics

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Alexander McCall Smith
"It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one's people had been."

Society

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Alexander McCall Smith
"He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands."

Language

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Alexander McCall Smith
"She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there."

Mind

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Alexander McCall Smith
"How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?"

Listening

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer."

Memory

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