Quotes by American Authors - Page 1928

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.P. 41
Timothy Snyder
I feel as though, if I were to extend my hand just a little toward the pool where the ideas ferment, I could grab at the idea and pull it out of the pool and onto the floor where ideas must stand before the jury of the brain. There, it must present itself, still from the pool, and a bit shivery because new ideas are not given a towel to dry off with, towels being reserved for proven theories; new ideas are simply pulled and stood up, and asked to explain themselves - not a very pleasant thing really, which is why so many people go into the room where the pool is. The exercise is exhausting not to mention a bit difficult to watch, if you are at all a sympathetic creature. What was my idea, anyways?
Emilie Autumn
There’s no hope for someone who doesn’t even know what hope is
Eric Garcia
Whenever pastors assume people in their congregation know certain things, they miss opportunities to teach. If a pastor makes assumptions year after year, then a whole generation has never heard [that truth] for the first time. If we assume too much, we communicate too little.
Andy Stanley
Successful people don't have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.
Ben Carson
For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.
Carl Sagan
You can't look at a sleeping cat and be tense.
Jane Pauley
With good morality first candidates you'll get bad candor, bad ethics, bad loyalty and bad morality - lastly bad odor will surface to save the day if you maintain good optimism like I do.
Brian Spellman
Customs change with time, so it isn't fair to permit change only when you happen to approve of it but condemn change citing biblical authority when you don't.
Deepak Chopra
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Jennifer L. Scott
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
To the romantic soul, the rituals of Valentine's Day echo every day of the year.
Richelle E. Goodrich
With the power of your love, you can change the world.
Debasish Mridha
As Christians we must realize there are millions of people in the world (indeed, within the Christian faith) who do not live by our worldview, and we must learn how to interact with them, love them, and tolerate them.
Holly Sprink
Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.
Christopher Hitchens
Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.
Rick Perlstein
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
Ernest Hemingway
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.
Donald Miller
Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.
Libba Bray
Talk about a dream,try to make it real
Bruce Springsteen
Peace is a road to happiness and the future.War is a road to destruction and death.
Debasish Mridha
These questions are difficult. The answers are not obvious, and so there should be some pausing, some angst, some honest uncertainty as people struggle to decide the best course of action. But I see none of this in the press releases and reports I read. Instead I see both sides telling us that to be uncertain, to dialogue instead of rail, is to betray the cause.
Alisa Harris
Stop treating your creativity like it’s a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Will you love me enough?
Ana Monnar
When God plans to bless a man, he takes this poor time-cursed creature into His hand and says., My son, I breath into you eternity and immortality.
A.W. Tozer
What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.'Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—''Purely hypothetical—''—time travelers.''So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.
Dexter Palmer
If you have enemies, good that means you stood up for something.
Eminem
Never go to another woman about your woman. Not unless you want an insidious form of advice.
Donna Lynn Hope
Men always seemed to growl and sniff around each other, bristling over nothing, and just as suddenly become buddies at the least likely moments.
Christine Feehan
Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.
Jane Green
Only when you are able to hear the songs of a tree will you be able to understand the magnificence and magic of life.
Debasish Mridha
So what if you believe it can’t be done. Stop trying to prevent those who do believe from reaching for the stars.
Teyla Branton
Can I ask you something?" He placed the chain around her neck.tShe nodded.t"Have you ever wanted something really badly that you know you shouldn't have, yet you can't stop yourself from wanting it?
Kait Ballenger
If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it – in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel.
James MacDonald
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation forWeak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.
Charles Yu
The things this man does to me are beyond what I feel should be possible. Butterflies. Fucking butterflies. Damn him.
Dennis Sharpe
When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.
Criss Jami
Forgiveness is not an event. It is a series of decisions made over and over again.
Karen Salmansohn
In silence you shall face self...and have respect.
T.F. Hodge
I'm on the side of whatever keeps the flowers growing.
Marty Rubin
I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure
Suzanne Anderson
As long as some sufferThe River Flows ForeverAs long as there is painThe River Flows ForeverAs strong as a smile can beThe River will Flow Forever
Tupac Shakur
My first thought was that a tornado had somehow picked me up and carried me off, like in the Wizard of Oz. No old witches pedaled by, and I didn't see any flying farm animals or chicken coops, and after a few agonizing minutes, I fell deep into unconsciousness again.
J.R. Rain
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
Richard Wright
Don't fight the trail, take what it gives you. If you have a choice between one step or two between rocks, take three.
Christopher McDougall
To achieve any success we have to endure some pain.
Debasish Mridha
Life will throw all kinds of obstacles our way. It's our job to scramble over them and hunt for the little miracles tucked away, then leave some reminders for the people that follow behind us.
Emily Page
Ideas are not immaculately conceived.
Jack Provonsha
Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line.
Valerie Martin
THREE MONTHS HAVE GONE BY without the taste of Gabriel Storm in my mouth, the scent of his skin in my nostrils, the rush of his powerful body pounding into mine.
Magda Alexander
If the bible be true, God commanded his chosen people to destroy men simply for the crime of defending their native land. They were not allowed to spare trembling and white-haired age, nor dimpled babes clasped in the mothers' arms. They were ordered to kill women, and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child. 'Our heavenly Father' commanded the Hebrews to kill the men and women, the fathers, sons and brothers, but to preserve the girls alive. Why were not the maidens also killed? Why were they spared? Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that the maidens were given to the soldiers and the priests. Is there, in all the history of war, a more infamous thing than this? Is it possible that God permitted the violets of modesty, that grow and shed their perfume in the maiden's heart, to be trampled beneath the brutal feet of lust? If this was the order of God, what, under the same circumstances, would have been the command of a devil? When, in this age of the world, a woman, a wife, a mother, reads this record, she should, with scorn and loathing, throw the book away. A general, who now should make such an order, giving over to massacre and rapine a conquered people, would be held in execration by the whole civilized world. Yet, if the bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Starting the DayThe Legacy Letters By Carew PapritzSometimes we make being happy so difficult. And being thankful such a chore. Starting the day like a job we hate. Beginning it like swallowing ten tablespoons of devil-made cough syrup. Because somehow along the way we forget that being alive and healthy and happy are noble goals-or just good ideas. And that the opposite of being alive is being dead. What a choice.
Carew Papritz
To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.
David Treuer
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.
Daniel Quinn
It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream.”The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn’t fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.
Nicholas D. Kristof
It is evident, therefore, that one of the most fundamental problems of psychology is that of investigating the laws of mental growth. When these laws are known, the door of the future will in a measure be opened; determination of the child's present status will enable us to forecast what manner of adult he will become.
Lewis Terman
Pray each morning and each night.Talk to God and be polite.Tell Him what you're grateful for.Leave your troubles at His door.Share your wishes, needs, and hopes.Ask God how to bravely cope.Tell Him all you learned today.Say the things you need to say.Beg forgiveness for your sins.Pray to live with Him again.Speak with earnest heart and soul.He will listen. This I know.For prayer is hope put to the test.And hope is faith in what is best.Faith is power to do great things.Thus, prayer is faith's enabling wings.
Richelle E. Goodrich
At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.
Tana French