Select Quotes

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.

This is a strange country we live in. When it comes to electing a President, we get two choices. But when we have to select a Miss America, we get 50.

Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices .

You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.

[We need to ] select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self- sufficient.

The recent arrest of Younis Tsouli in the United Kingdom was no doubt a significant victory in the war against online terrorism. Tsouli was one of a very select few individuals who have successfully used the Internet as a means to network and share resources with a host of Al-Qaida-linked terrorist organizations.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people don't worry unduly about whether they'll be found wanting, they just find too much socializing exhausting and would prefer either to be alone or in the company of a select few people.

If the means to which the government of the union may resort for executing the power confided to it, are unlimited, it may easily select such as will impair or destroy the powers confided to the state governments.

Art is not an elitist gift for a few select people. Art is for everyone.

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present.

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically.

... our purpose in founding our state was not to promote the happiness of a single class, but, so far as possible, of the whole community. Our idea was that we were most likely to justice in such a community, and so be able to decide the question we are trying to answer. We are therefore at the moment trying to construct what we think is a happy community by securing the happiness not of a select minority, but of a whole.

If we are genuinely concerned about the environment and the fellow human beings, and want to end territorial disputes, war, crime, poverty, hunger, and the other problems that confront us today, the intelligent use of science and technology are the tools with which to achieve a new direction – one that will serve all people, and not just a select few.

I challenge youth to cooperate with parents who are concerned about your reading and your viewing. Be concerned yourself about what you take into your mind. Young people, you would never eat a meal of spoiled or contaminated food if you could help it, would you? Select your reading and viewing carefully and in good taste.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

That instability is inherent in the nature of popular governments, I think very disputable … A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislature, executive, and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.

I generally don't select my chicken or my hamburgers based on the personal ideology of the person who is either flipping the hamburgers or making the money back at corporate headquarters. But if people want to do that, they're free to do it.

The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress.

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

Select candidates by integrity of character, not promises.

Let the record show that you can be a United States senator for 21 years. You can be 79 years old. You can be the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and one of the most recognizable and widely-respected veteran public servants in your nation. But if you are female while all of those things, men who you defeat in arguments will still respond to you by calling you hysterical and telling you to calm down. They'll patronize you and say they admire your passion, 'sweetie,' but they deal in facts, not your silly, girly feelings. It's inescapable. You can set your watch by it.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

We should manage our thoughts as shepherds do their flowers in making a garland: first, select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, that every one may reflect a part of its color and brightness on the next.

Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out.

For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

I think the best thing an artist can do is not hang out with other artists. I really dislike hanging out with musicians, for the most part, except for a few select friends, because I don't like to talk about music all the time.

It's fun to play around... it's human nature to try to select the right horse... But for the average person, I'm more of an indexer... The predictability is so high... For 10, 15, 20 years you'll be in the 85th percentile of performance. Why would you screw it up?

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.

Confidence comes from seeing so many sides, angles, views, and tangents. Because when you do select an approach or direction, you are doing so with better/ more complete information.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to a select few.

A realistic definition of risk recognizes the potential loss of capital through inflation and taxes, and would include at least the following two factors: The probability that the investment you chose will preserve your capital over the time you intend to invest your funds. The probability the investments you select will outperform alternative investments for this period.

If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms].

A patient doesn't select his physical ailments. They happen to him. You could just as well ask when you are eaten by a crocodile, 'How did you select that crocodile?'. Nonsense. He has selected you. The patient doesn't even select the symptoms unconsciously. That is an extraordinary exaggeration of the subject to say he was choosing such things. They get him.

Good generals select intelligent officers, thoughtful advisors, and brave subordinates. They oversee their troops like a fierce tiger with wings.

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren't sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education.

If... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.

I am no longer interested in seeing and knowing everything all at once in my work. Technically I select the area of focus and if it's possible I try to make an amalgamation of every shape and color in the picture so that it acquires a circular movement: from representation to abstraction, from life to death, and vice-versa.

Individuals for whom no orthodox cure is available surely are entitled to select a health care approach.....This right (is) specifically within,,,the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments to the (US) Constitution....To be insensitive to the very fundamental civil liberties....(:) the choice...of the person whose body is being ravaged (by disease), is to display slight understanding of the essence of our free society and its constitutional underpinnings.