Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ron Chernow

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

Umberto Eco

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

Umberto Eco

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Trudi Canavan

Nodding, Cery strode to the door and stepped through. Though the burly guards eyes him suspiciously, Cery smiled back. Never make enemies of someone's lackeys, his father had taught him. Better still, make them like you a lot.

Truman Capote

My father was quite an attractive guy. He was very intelligent and very amusing. I didn't like him. He was always very nice to me but I just didn't like him.

Trisha Goddard

Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system.

William Ruckelshaus

I have no hostility towards men. Some of my best friends are men. I married a man, and my father was a man.

William Robertson Smith

The god, it would appear, was frequently thought of as the physical progenitor or first father of his people.

William Maxwell

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

Vincente Minnelli

The Long, Long Trailer (1954) actually happened and the man wrote a book about it. Father of the Bride, same thing; a banker wrote that who had never written anything else.

Vincente Minnelli

The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.

Woody Herman

The singing was something I got from my father.

Woody Harrelson

I remember my daughter Deni coming along, and she was so pure and caring of everybody and everything. And somehow, this little being managed to get around all the obstacles - the gun turrets, the walls, the moats, the sentries - that were wrapped around my heart. My heart at that time needed her ... I think it's the best thing going, parenthood.

Woodrow Wilson

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

Woody Allen

My father owned a small piece of land. He carried it with him wherever he went.

William Winwood Reade

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

William Saroyan

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

William Shatner

People have an affinity towards things, and you don't know where it comes from. Mozart wrote a symphony when he was four, so it's said; the theory is maybe because his father was a conductor, it happened in vitro, and he heard the music before he was born, and by the age of four he knew how to write music.

William McKinley

The path of progress is seldom smooth. New things are often found hard to do. Our fathers found them so. We find them so. But are we not made better for the effort and scarifice?

William McKinley

Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial and who will not forsake us so long as we obey His commandments and walk humbly in His footsteps

William J. Clinton

When, President Bush asks me to go with his father to the Tsunami impacted areas and help raise money, I was thrilled to do that, because I think we have to always keep looking for common ground.

William J. Clinton

Thomas Jefferson understood the greater purpose of the liberty that our Founding Fathers sought during the creation of our Nation. Although it was against the British that the colonists fought for political rights, the true source of the rights of man was clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote that all humans are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . . It was self-evident to him that denying these rights was wrong and that he and others must struggle to win what was theirs.

William J. Clinton

In speaking powerfully and eloquently for mercy and reconciliation to people divided by old hatreds and persecuted by abuse of power, the Holy Father was a beacon of light not just for Catholics, but for all people.

Will Ferrell

I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.

Sarah Silverman

You can be Hitler and go to confession and say forgive me, Father, I killed six million Jews, and the priest would just be like no problem. Say 10 Heil Marys. And Hitler goes to heaven.

Sarah Palin

There is nothing more important in my life than my relationship with God and my faith. I have been so driven to my knees to pray for His guidance, for His wisdom, for His grace and for His Strength. I'm never going to tell anybody else how to live, I'm never going to preach to anybody else and tell them you must do that. But I sure would like to see more Americans give it a try and seek the guidance that our Founding Fathers sought and were able to [then] craft documents that allowed America to become the greatest, strongest, healthiest, most prosperous nation on earth.

Sarah Palin

Lest anyone try to convince you that God should be separated from the state, our founding fathers, they were believers. And George Washington, he saw faith in God as basic to life.

Sarah Addison Allen

Her life was monotonous, but it kept her out of trouble. . . . This, her father would say, was called being an adult.

Sara Gilbert

It may be hard on some fathers not to have a son, but it is much harder on a boy not to have a father.

Samuel Smiles

Alexander the Great valued learning so highly, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge than to his father Philip for life.

Rebecca Stead

Didn't you ever have a father yourself? You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.' So I figured it's because I never had a father that I don't want one now. A person can't miss something she never had.

Richard Ford

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Richard Gere

I had a friend in the neighborhood whose father had Playboy magazines, and we would go over and look at them. I remember cutting out pictures and hiding them in my room.