Famous Quotes & Sayings

Theodore Roosevelt

The United States does not have a choice as to whether or not is will or will not play a great part in the world. Fate has made that choice for us. The only question is whether we will play the part well or badly.

Terry Pratchett

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?

Margaret Drabble

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Margaret Heffernan

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

Michelle Alexander

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

Michael Tolkin

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

Michael Parenti

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

Maurice Strong

Nothing less than the fate of the planet is at stake... No place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery.

Matthew Lillard

You may not have faith in my friend fate, But my friend fate has faith in you.

Matthew Arnold

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

Matthew Arnold

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Meg Rosoff

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Maxim Gorky

All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer -- Man.

Max Beerbohm

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

Patricia Briggs

My father said that a silent person is trying to hide something.

P. J. O'Rourke

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

Plato

All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.

Paul Zane Pilzer

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

Martin Schulz

Refugees cost us money too when they come to us. If we improve their living conditions in Turkey, we create an incentive for them to stay there and not to place their fates in the hands of smugglers.

Laura Linney

I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.

Laini Taylor

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

Laini Taylor

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Lisa See

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.

Lisa See

I didn't know you would be here last night, but you were. We can't fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.

Lisa Kleypas

It seemed as if some subtle current of recognition had passed between them... not as if they had met before... but as if they had come close several times until finally an impatient Fate had forced their paths to intersect.

Lisa Kleypas

Fate is the malevolent little jester sitting up in the heavens and pondering over how ridiculous we humans are and he does his best to make fools out of all of us. And sooner or later he succeeds.

John Updike

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

John Stuart Mill

If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.

John Scott

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

John Philpot Curran

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

John Piper

Don't wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him... so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God.

Martin Luther

Whoever sees Christ as a mirror of the Father's heart, actually walks through the world with new eyes.

Mark Strand

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.