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American politics13 quotes

These men and women...ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. — Anthony Kennedy · 2015 I live in a rather special world. I know only one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them. — Pauline Kael · 1972 It'll play in Peoria. — John Ehrlichman · 1969 I would just like to say that no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence. And that I'm sorry. I'm really sorry for everything that's happened. And I hate Linda Tripp. — Monica Lewinsky · 1998 Well, when the president does it…that means that it is not illegal. — Richard Nixon · 1977 North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. — Richard Nixon · 1969 All 13 quotes →

Art5 quotes

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. — Susan Sontag · 1973 Instead of looking at things, look between things. — John Baldessari · 2009 Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. — Susan Sontag · 1966 Art is a completed pass. You don't just throw it out into the world-someone has to catch it. — James Turrell · 2013 Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. — Susan Sontag · 1966

Vietnam War5 quotes

Some folks are born made to wave the flag, Ooh, that red, white, and blue. And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief," Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord, It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no senator's son, no. It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one. — Creedence Clearwater Revival · 1969 North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. — Richard Nixon · 1969 Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. — Richard Nixon · 1969 If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation...acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. — Richard Nixon · 1970 We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the priniples and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribbly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why. — Robert McNamara · 1995

War5 quotes

There are no atheists in the fox holes. — William Thomas Cummings · 1943 Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. — George S. Patton · 1969 North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. — Richard Nixon · 1969 We all make mistakes. We know we make mistakes. I don't know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he has not made a mistake. There's a wonderful phrase: "the fog of war." What "the fog of war" means is: war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily. — Robert McNamara · 2003 Military force—especially when wielded by an outside power—just cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself. — Robert McNamara · 1995

Politics4 quotes

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. — Richard Nixon · 1973 If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. — Ray Bradbury · 1953 Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. — Richard Nixon · 1969 Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? — Susan Sontag · 2001

Stories4 quotes

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion · 1979 Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. — Ray Bradbury · 1990 Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people. — Ursula K. Le Guin · 2002 Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. — Susan Sontag · 2003

Artist and audience3 quotes

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience. — Lester Bangs · 1977 No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Robert Frost · 1939 Art is a completed pass. You don't just throw it out into the world-someone has to catch it. — James Turrell · 2013

Books3 quotes

I discovered me in the library. — Ray Bradbury · 2010 You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. — Ray Bradbury · 1993 There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. — Ray Bradbury · 2010

Culture3 quotes

Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people. — Ursula K. Le Guin · 2002 You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. — Ray Bradbury · 1993 There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. — Clifford Geertz · 1973

Fear3 quotes

Courage is as contagious as fear. — Susan Sontag · 2003 I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. — Jack London · 1916 There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves. — Ray Bradbury · 1950

Following your heart3 quotes

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. — Steve Jobs · 2005 Stay hungry, stay foolish. — Steve Jobs · 1974 You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something…because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference. — Steve Jobs · 2005

Love3 quotes

I can’t make you love me if you don’t. You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t. — Bonnie Raitt · 1991 Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. — Ursula K. Le Guin · 1971 Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well. — Thornton Wilder · 1927

Political scandals3 quotes

I would just like to say that no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence. And that I'm sorry. I'm really sorry for everything that's happened. And I hate Linda Tripp. — Monica Lewinsky · 1998 People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. — Richard Nixon · 1973 I brought myself down. I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I'd had been in their position, I'd have done the same thing. — Richard Nixon · 1977

Self-respect3 quotes

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. — Joan Didion · 1961 To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. — Joan Didion · 1961 To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. — Joan Didion · 1961

Taste3 quotes

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not... The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. — Susan Sontag · 1964 The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. — Susan Sontag · 1964 The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is...I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. — Steve Jobs · 1996

The human condition3 quotes

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. — Jack London · 1903 We never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing. — Joan Didion · 1992 We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. — Joan Didion · 2005

Writing3 quotes

I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn't realize what a strong person I was, I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn. — Ray Bradbury · 2002 No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Robert Frost · 1939 I've often fantasized I would get a lot of writing done if I were put in prison for a minor crime. Three to six months. — Amy Tan · 2013

America2 quotes

Let us be proud that our system has produced and provided more freedom and more abundance, more widely shared, than any system in the history of the world. — Richard Nixon · 1973 Our children have been taught to be ashamed of their country, ashamed of their parents, ashamed of America's record at home and of its role in the world. At every turn, we have been beset by those who find everything wrong with America and little that is right. But I am confident that this will not be the judgment of history on these remarkable times in which we are privileged to live. — Richard Nixon · 1973

American character2 quotes

Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. — George S. Patton · 1969 We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough... We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. — Gretel Ehrlich · 1985

Beauty2 quotes

"Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. — Naomi Wolf · 1990 So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. — Susan Sontag · 1977

Civil rights2 quotes

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone... We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. — Earl Warren · 1954 No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man. — Richard Nixon · 1969

Death2 quotes

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. — Steve Jobs · 2005 A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die... Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. — Jack London · 1902

Facing death2 quotes

There are no atheists in the fox holes. — William Thomas Cummings · 1943 A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die... Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. — Jack London · 1902

God and man2 quotes

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God. — Thornton Wilder · 1927 Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. — Robert Frost · 1962

Home2 quotes

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. — Robert Frost · 1914 Home is wherever I'm with you. — Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros · 2010

Interconnectedness of all people2 quotes

We have to be people who set each other free. — Harry Hay · 1998 No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man. — Richard Nixon · 1969

Living life to the fullest2 quotes

I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet. — Jack London · 1916 I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. — Jack London · 1916

Marriage2 quotes

These men and women...ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. — Anthony Kennedy · 2015 The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so. — Thornton Wilder · 1954

Music2 quotes

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? — John Cage · 1961 Music, you know, true music, not just rock n roll, it chooses you. — Lester Bangs · 2000

Patriarchy2 quotes

What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. — Naomi Wolf · 1990 "Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. — Naomi Wolf · 1990