Famous Quotes & Sayings

Salman Rushdie

optimism is a disease

Robert Louis Stevenson

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.

Sarah Dessen

He'd always had that fearless optimism that made cynics like me squirm. I wondered if it was enough for both of us. I would never know from here, though. And time was passing. Crucial minutes and seconds, each one capable of changing everything.

William Arthur Ward

Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.

Samuel Johnson

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Joseph Addison

I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

Nelson Mandela

I approach every problem with optimism.

Noam Chomsky

There is always room for Gramsci's "optimism of the will."

Kirk Douglas

No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if my stroke left me with a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right.

Rick Riordan

She would always be my biggest what if.

Tucker Max

I could never kill myself. What if it doesn't work. Then I'll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?

Willa Cather

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

Werner Erhard

The important question to ask is not 'Will we surivive?' but 'What if we survive?'

Robin McKinley

What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing--a very hard thing... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?

Mike Lupica

We can what-if ourselves to death... But what-if never does anybody any good. All any of us ever have...is one thing, and we better make the most of it while we can: What is.

Kathy Reichs

I see you, Ben. I always have. You're in my pack." He pulled away. "What if being packmates isn't enough for me?

Newt Gingrich

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.

Jodi Picoult

What if it turns out that a life isn’t defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you’ve lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?

Richard M. Nixon

There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.

Salman Rushdie

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

Salman Rushdie

Free speech is life itself.

Robert Orben

Humor is the most honest of emotions. Applause for a speech can be insincere, but with humor, if the audience doesn't like it there's no faking it.

Robert Louis Stevenson

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Robin Quivers

We shouldn't have free speech.

Wislawa Szymborska

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

Zhuangzi

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Winston Churchill

Haven't you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.