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Quotes by American Authors
"I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here."
"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."
"The starting point of all achievement is desire."
"The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way."
"If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it."
"What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none."
"Death is lighter than a feather. Duty, heavier than a mountain."
"I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies."
"Positively Inspired Man of Purpose, my style is P.I.M.P.'ish."
"No clergyman however brilliant, no evangelist no matter how eloquent or compelling, can bring about the revival we need. Only the Holy Spirit can do this."
"I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home."
"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
"Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."
"If your neighbor has a completely different view on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, all of those things, you still are both Americans. Neither one of you is necessarily more patriotic than the other. Neither loves their country any more than the other one does."
"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks."
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
"You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."
"When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results."
"To do more for the world than the world does for you - that is success."
"Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman."
"True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful."
"I basically became a cheerleader because I had a very strict mom. That was my way of being a bad girl."
"The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back."
"If we're going to win the pennant, we've got to start thinking we're not as good as we think we are."
"LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing."
"I always mean what I say, but I don't always say what I'm thinking."
"Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter."
"You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit."
"A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others."
"Pope John Paul II not only was a powerful spiritual leader for Catholics but also a world leader of extraordinary consequence during the last quarter-century."
"Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past."
"India profoundly changed my outlook on life because you see how people can be content and very happy with little or even no possessions. It's the reverse of the West."
"He was the most wickedly handsome creature she had ever seen in all her days. His hair was black as night, his stature large, his muscles were etched with precision into his smooth skin, every last ripple chiseled into wicked perfection."
"When I was a kid, my dream was to be a farmer and marry Charlie Brown. I wanted to rescue him and make him happy. Besides, he was always lusting after the little redhead girl."
"I often feel that my days in New York City, that I was here for five years, didn't get one job, went on a thousands of auditions and literally did not get a job on a soap, not a movie, not TV, not nothing, although I did do some commercials thank God."
"I used to feel so shy speaking to girls. It was even worse when they were around their crew because they would diss me."
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