Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Okri

We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

Benito Mussolini

Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.

Jane Goodall

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

Calvin Coolidge

Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.

Alain Badiou

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.

Charles Darwin

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Vandana Shiva

The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way - as a geometric progression - forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live.

Jared Diamond

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Bret Easton Ellis

She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass. Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.

Archibald MacLeish

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

Alanis Morissette

I thought the more famous I became, the more friendships I would have, but the opposite was true.

Daniel Handler

We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.

Dan Barker

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.

Edmund Burke

Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness; for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.

Eckhart Tolle

Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.

Elif Safak

I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome.

Aristotle

Rhetoric is useful because truth and justice are in their nature stronger than their opposites; so that if decisions be made, not in conformity to the rule of propriety, it must have been that they have been got the better of through fault of the advocates themselves: and this is deserving reprehension.

Stephen Jay Gould

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

Jay Leno

It was very funny. It was agony for him when it was 'stolen' from the yard. Women think it's so cruel. Guys think it's hilarious. It's a guy thing I guess.

Patrick Fitzgerald

You need to understand the pain, the horror, the agony that the bombing put so many families through.

Suzy Menkes

I think there's a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it's only fashion, that in the end it's only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions.

Rose George

Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.

Allama Iqbal

What avails love when life is so ephemeral? What avaiIs a mortals love for the immortal? Love that is snuffed out by deaths passing blast Love without the pain, the passion that consumes? A flickering spark I am, aglow for a fleeting glance Flow vain for a flickering spark to chase an eternal flame! Grant me the bliss of eternal life, O Lord, And mine will be the ecstasy of eternal love. Give me the pleasure of an everlasting pain An agony that lacerates my soul for ever.

Cotton Mather

What Must I Do to Be Saved? It is impossible to ask a more weighty Question! It is deplorable that we hear it asked with no more Frequency, with nor more Agony.

Aldous Huxley

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

Rick Riordan

Die, enemies of Ra!" Sekhemet yelled. "Perish in agony!" "She's almost as annoying as you," I told Horus. "Impossible," Horus said. "No one bests Horus.

Spike Milligan

Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently