Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alan Watts

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

Alan Moore

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Alan Moore

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Alan Bennett

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Alan Bennett

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Alan Ball

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Alan Alda

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

Alan Alda

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

Charles Caleb Colton

Falsehood, like a drawing in perspective, will not bear to be examined in every point of view, because it is a good imitation of truth, as a perspective is of the reality, only in one. But truth, like that reality of which the perspective is the representation, will bear to be scrutinized in all points of view, and though examined under every situation, is one and the same.

Alan Watts

Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.

Alan Watts

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Alan Watts

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Alan Watts

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Alan Watts

Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality...

Alan Watts

I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag , whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people , and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

Alan Watts

Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.

Alan Watts

The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.

Alan Bullock

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Alan Blinder

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

Al Smith

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

David McCullough

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

David Korten

We can have democracy and a prosperous, just, and sustainable human future. Or we can have corporate rule. We cannot have both.

David Korten

Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.

C. Wright Mills

Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

Carl Icahn

Im a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.

Ai Weiwei

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.