Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louis MacNeice

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy' And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.

Louis MacNeice

September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

John Buchan

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

Malcolm X

Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its hum an rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you ? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....

Malcolm X

A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, "I'm going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me." No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing "We Shall Overcome"? Just tell me. You don't do that in a revolution. You don't do any singing; you're too busy swinging.

Mahatma Gandhi

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

Mahatma Gandhi

India is one vast prison with high walls of suppression clothing her mind and her body.

Louise Gluck

So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

Genghis Khan

The strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them.

Genghis Khan

The strength of a wall is neither greater nor less than the courage of the men who defend it.

The handwriting has been on the wall for 25 months.

Maya Angelou

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

Maya Angelou

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

Maya Angelou

In a long meter hymn, a singer - they call it 'lays out a line.' And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can't wedge a pin between it.

Maya Angelou

The public library building, in my view, is just a little lower than the church, the cathedral, the temple, the synagogue and the mosque. Within those walls and along those stacks, I have found security and assurance.

Maya Angelou

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

Maurice Sendak

And the walls became the world all around.

Matt Taibbi

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

Matt Taibbi

Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

Matt Taibbi

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

Matt Taibbi

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

Matt Taibbi

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

Matt Taibbi

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

Matt Taibbi

'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail.

Meg Wolitzer

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

Max Brooks

During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

Maurice de Vlaminck

Vermilion alone could render the brilliant red of the tiles on the opposite slope. The orange of the soil, the harsh crude colors of the walls and greenery, the ultramarine and cobalt of the sky achieved an extreme harmony that was sensually and musically ordered.

Mark Skousen

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

Marina Abramovic

When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he cant cover himself with words, he cant create a wall.

Mary Engelbreit

Life is too short to leave your walls bare or colorless. Unless you like bare and colorless then it is fine.

Patricia Briggs

Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asked. ”Enough to accept my apologies?” I suggested in a small voice. ”Heck no,” he said, and pushed off from the wall, stalking forward. When he reached me, he put his hands up and touched the sides of my neck with the tips of his fingers – as if I were something fragile. ”No apologies from you,” he told me, his voice soft enough to melt my knees and most of my other parts.

Pablo Neruda

Our love was born outside the walls, in the wind, in the night, in the earth, and that's why the clay and the flower, the mud and the roots know your name.

Pablo Neruda

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.