Famous Quotes & Sayings

Christopher Heyerdahl

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

Christopher Hitchens

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

Christopher Hitchens

When the [US] president writes to Kim Jong Il, the son, the Dear Leader, he doesn't call him Dear Mr President, he calls him Dear Mr Secretary. Have you ever noticed that? Why is that? Because he's not the president of North Korea, he's the head of the Communist Party, the North Korean Workers' Party and he's the head of the Army. He's not head of the state. The head of the state is his father, who's been dead for 15 years.

Francois Rabelais

Bottle, whose Mysterious Deep Do's ten thousand Secrets keep, With attentive Ear I wait; Ease my Mind, and speak my Fate.

Horace

Fate with impartial hand turns out the doom of high and low; her capacious urn is constantly shaking the names of all mankind.

Horace

Evenhanded fate hath but one law for small and great; the ample urn holds all men's names.

Horace

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Horace

I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine.

Horace

Deep in the cavern of the infant's breast; the father's nature lurks, and lives anew.

Hank Aaron

[My father] didn't make much money, and I tell a lot of people, you know, I was a vegetarian before people knew what a vegetarian was. That's all I ate was vegetables.

Hannah Arendt

It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of ‘destiny,’ you not only change its ‘natural laws’ but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.

Hannah Arendt

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

Gore Vidal

I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.

Gore Vidal

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy."

Gore Vidal

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, "I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any." We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Gore Vidal

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

Gore Vidal

Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.

Gore Vidal

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt's Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

James E. Faust

Noble fatherhood gives us a glimpse of the divine attributes of our Father in Heaven.

James D. Watson

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

James D. Watson

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

James Branch Cabell

For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

James Bovard

The vision that the founding fathers had of rule of law and equality before the law and no one above the law, that is a very viable vision, but instead of that, we have quasi mob rule.

James Boswell

My father had declared a predilection for heirs general, that is, males and females indiscriminately.... I, on the other hand, had a zealous partiality for heirs male, however remote.

Jake T. Austin

It's important to have a fallback and other activities that keep you interested. I started acting when I was about nine or 10 years old. My father was a midtown firefighter so I always wanted to be a firefighter, but then acting came along. I have to have a plan B.

Jacques Audiard

When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.

Jackie Cooper

I remember Mr. Mayer very well. He sort of liked to be the father - no, he liked to be treated like you thought he was Daddy, but he didn't treat you like Daddy at all.

James Gates Percival

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I don't see why the likes o' thee Without axin' leave should go makin' free With the shank or the shin o' my father's kin; So hand the old bone over! Rover! Trover! Though dead he be, it belongs to he; So hand the old bnone over!

J. R. R. Tolkien

Don't dip your beard in the foam, Father!" They cried to Thorin. "It is long enough without watering it!

J. R. R. Tolkien

And here he was, a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside, expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. It was an evil fate.

J. R. R. Tolkien

You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.

Iyanla Vanzant

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.