Famous Quotes & Sayings

David McCullough

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

C. Wright Mills

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Cesare Pavese

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cary Grant

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

E. Hicks

When you think about it, history is made to be broken. That's the way we look at it.

Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Kurt Vonnegut

History! Read it and weep!

Edward Gibbon

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Charles Dickens

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.

Charles Caleb Colton

We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.

Charles Dickens

If Natur has gifted a man with powers of argeyment, a man has a right to make the best of 'em, and has not a right to stand on false delicacy, and deny that he is so gifted; for that is a turning of his back on Natur, a flouting of her, a slighting of her precious caskets, and a proving of one's self to be a swine that isn't worth her scattering pearls before.

Charles Dickens

When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.

Charles Dickens

The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Charles Dickens

A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.

Charles Dickens

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

Charles Dickens

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

Charles Dickens

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.

Gunter Blobel

The structure of many cellular macromolecules has been revealed at the atomic level using x-ray crystallography.

Jacki Weaver

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

Christopher Molineux

Sometimes things are most truly revealed by the illuminance of twilight

Stephen Manes

What's been revealed of Windows Vista is particularly sad.

Charles Caleb Colton

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

Charles Caleb Colton

No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.

Charles Caleb Colton

The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind; but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.

Alan Watts

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Dave Barry

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.

Dave Barry

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

David Sarnoff

I ... began my career as a wireless amateur. After 43 years in radio, I do not mind confessing that I am still an amateur. Despite many great achievements in the science of radio and electronics, what we know today is far less than what we have still to learn.

David Sarnoff

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Dick Cavett

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

Ed Sullivan

I wouldn't have Elvis Presley on my show at any time.

Monica Raymund

Lie to Me' is one of the smartest shows on TV. We have something different, unique and new to say to the audience that they're not going to get from any other show.

Stephen Urban

We don't have any documentation that shows ownership,

Demetri Martin

I never set out to do a sketch show.

Tracie Thoms

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

Brian Henson

The show is probably 60 percent improvising and 40 percent not. So there's quite a bit of it that we do have prepared and that part of it, you have memorized and you've rehearsed and you're prepared, just like any show.

Callie Khouri

Whenever I've seen shows or films set here, they just don't feel like the real Nashville to me.

Earl Nightingale

What's going on in the inside shows on the outside.

Abdolkarim Soroush

Goals and objectives are based on theories and foundations.

Simon Travaglia

There's no such thing as 'facts of life'. Only standing theories that haven't been disproved as of yet.

Charles Caleb Colton

Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs; for truth, like light, travels only in straight lines.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is not so difficult a task as to plant new truths, as to root out old errors

Charles Caleb Colton

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

Alanis Morissette

I think everyone's hungry for the truth

Alan Watts

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

Alan Watts

Duality is always secretly unity.

Alan Arkin

Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.

Al Pacino

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is with disease of the mind, as with those of the body; we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.

Alan Moore

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.

Chinua Achebe

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

David Shuster

There are a lot of folks at Fox News who bring a certain level of sophistication to their understanding of politics.

David Sedaris

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

David Sedaris

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

David Koechner

What helps you as an actor when it comes to roles is that deeper understanding of so many different fractions of humanity. Because oftentimes, even in comedy, there is conflict.

Carl Sagan

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

Carl Sagan

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.

Charles Spurgeon

The more you know about Christ, the less you will be satisfied with superficial views of Him.

Alan Parker

The films that I do tend to polarise people's views.

Alan Perlis

One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

Akhmad Kadyrov

One has to work for years and decades, to conduct negotiations, to stand for positions and points of view, to jointly develop a civilized view on the administrative and state organization of Chechnya.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

A low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils. A high view of God is the solution to ten thousand temporal problems.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.

Chogyam Trungpa

The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death.

Chogyam Trungpa

Fearlessness is extending ourselves beyond our limited view.

Chogyam Trungpa

The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.