Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Mr Jarndyce, and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.

Charles Dickens

The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.

Charles Dickens

Though we are perpetually bragging of it [the middle class] as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper class.

Charles Dickens

The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.

Chris Colfer

When one thing takes another away, what do we call that?” she asked my class. “Homicide!” I called out

Dave Barry

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

Cesare Pavese

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

Carter G. Woodson

Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

Camille Paglia

I regard affirmative action as pernicious-a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

Charles Dickens

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Charles Caleb Colton

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most notorious swindler has not assumed so many names as self-love, nor is so much ashamed of his own. She calls herself patriotism, when at the same time she is rejoicing at just as much calamity to her native country as will introduce herself into power, and expel her rivals.

Charles Dickens

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Charles Dickens

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Alan Rickman

And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

Chet Atkins

You shape your own destiny.

Darren Shan

That’s what you taught me - we don’t have to accept destiny or Des Tiny. We can create our own future, all of us. We have the power to rule our lives - we just have to make the choice to use it.

Darren Shan

Destiny is a tower of cards - nudge one just an inch and everything stacked on top comes crashing down. P116

Darren Shan

Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you.

Cesare Pavese

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Cesare Pavese

Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.

Cesare Pavese

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.

Cesare Pavese

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

Charles Caleb Colton

A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

Charles Dickens

When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better--those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.

Charles Dickens

Home is a word stronger than a magician ever spoke.

Charles Dickens

"We thought that, perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them."

Charles Stuart Calverley

I've read in many a novel, that unless they've souls that grovel-- Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls.

Charles Studd

Send us people with initiative, who can carry themselves and others too; such as need to be carried hamper the work and weaken those who should be spending their strength on the heathen. Weaklings should be nursed at home! If any have jealousy, prides, or talebearing traits lurking about them, do not send them, nor any who are prone to criticize. Send only Pauls and Timothys; men who are full of zeal, holiness and power. All others are hindrances. If you send us ten such men the work will be done.

Charles Studd

The light that shines farthest shines brightest nearest home.

Charles Stanley

We're enlarging in every single area of the ministry at In Touch. We're on radio and television. We're in over 110 million homes in America plus radio on satellites. We just acquired the NAMB FamilyNet television network, and with that expanding possibilities of the gospel.

Charles Spurgeon

What, for some, is sin, others do to the glory of God. And the good Dr. Pentecost's remarks notwithstanding , I intend to go home tonight and smoke a cigar to the glory of God. It is a kind of incense drifting to Heaven.

Charles Dickens

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

Charles Dickens

An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.

Charles Dickens

The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among men.

Charles Dickens

It is required of every man," the ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.

Charles Dickens

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Charles Dickens

Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat.

Charles Caleb Colton

When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement; for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.

Charles Caleb Colton

No man can promise himself even fifty years of life, but any man may, if he please, live in the proportion of fifty years in forty-let him rise early, that he may have the day before him, and let him make the most of the day, by determining to expend it on two sorts of acquaintance only-those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something maybe learned.

Lance Lattin

We struggled to clog up the middle and prevent shots from outside the 18.

Kurt Vonnegut

Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

Madeleine Albright

It takes more than one dove to make peace in the Middle East.

Randy Simmons

When I was a middle school principal it disgusts me, some of the things I had to work through at that young age.

Rodney Atkins

I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.

Diane Sawyer

I get involved in the beginning, less in the middle, and very much at the end.

Anthony Rapp

Everyone tells us you really don't know what you're capable of till you're in the middle of it.

Bashar al-Assad

Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.

Jiggs Thomason

We treat it no differently than a rainout in the middle of the season. We never make up a points race.

Byron Katie

Happiness is the natural state for someone who knows that there's nothing to know.

Bill Richardson

Natural gas is the future. It is here.

Bertrand Russell

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.

Steve Reynolds

We have no strategic reserves for natural gas,

Robert Brown

When he first started, it was all just natural talent. Now we have him sprinting, he's strengthening his legs, and I think he is going to reach 6-8 soon.

Chanel Iman

I'm really into natural and organic products.

John Lang

Tony is a natural leader, not only on the field, but off it. He'll have everyone's support.

Willa Cather

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Leon Askin

We wanted to bring the political situation in Austria on stage. Naturally we could not do that without pointing to Austrian's northern neighbor Germany.

Charles Caleb Colton

Flattery is often a traffic of mutual meanness, where although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived.

Charles Dickens

There can't be a quarrel without two parties, and I won't be one. I will be a friend to you in spite of you. So now you know what you've got to expect

Charles Dickens

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.

Charles Dickens

I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.

Charles Dickens

The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.

Alan Grayson

Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties. That's really wrong. Many of the libertarians are physicists, and many of the Tea Party people don't bathe. There's really not much in common there!

Alan Colmes

If what you are claiming is true, I would have shouted it from the rooftops. I would have gone to the authorities, the FBI, the police, the Democratic (Party) anybody that would listen. I wouldn't depend on one guy with the Department of Transportation.

Alan Arkin

That's what we're all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

Al Sharpton

This is not about what party you're part of. This is about right and wrong, ... the conscience of this nation.

Camille Claudel

My countrymen have commissioned a bust of the Republic. It will be placed on the fountain of my native town.

Charley Pride

There are worse things than being thought a Republican.

Chely Wright

I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican-I'm an American, I'm a human.

Bill Maher

There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore.

Bill Maher

Because of the Republicans, I'm not ashamed of being an American. I'm embarrassed!

Bill Maher

How can the Republicans get away with picking their Dennis Kucinich, but when - if the Democrats tried it, all hell would break lose?

Benjamin Franklin

What have you wrought ... A Republic if you can keep it.

Ron Reagan

Now, ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates and destroys.

Charles Caleb Colton

Modesty is the richest ornament of a woman ... the want of it is her greatest deformity.

Charles Caleb Colton

A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.

Charles Caleb Colton

The plainest man who pays attention to women, will sometimes succeed as well as the handsomest man who does not.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

Charles Dickens

She's the sort of woman now,' said Mould, . . . 'one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing: and do it neatly, too!

Alan Jay Lerner

You see what happens today. Women act like men and want to be treated like women.