Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Steinbeck

...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over...

John Scott

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

John Philpot Curran

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

Mark Strand

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

Mark Steyn

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

Nancy Farmer

But I also know that to ignore joy while it lasts, in favor of lamenting one's fate, is a great crime.

Skylar Astin

You definitely have to be focused at certain times in your life and in your career, but at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do. Then you just have to chock it up to fate.

Michael Shermer

The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.

Michael Moorcock

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

Michael Moorcock

Destiny's Champion, Fate's fool. Eternity's Soldier, Time's Tool.

Theodore Roosevelt

The United States does not have a choice as to whether or not is will or will not play a great part in the world. Fate has made that choice for us. The only question is whether we will play the part well or badly.

Terry Pratchett

What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?

Margaret Drabble

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Margaret Heffernan

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

Michelle Alexander

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

Michael Parenti

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

Eric Hoffer

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

Eric Hoffer

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

Eric Hoffer

I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.

James F. Cooper

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.

Jacques Monod

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.

Helen Hayes

Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

One must always say every word with consideration, and should not say what one does not wish to happen. Those who do not understand the value of suggestion walk after their own fate with a whip in their hand, and those who understand its value and control their word and use it rightly, they are a bliss to themselves and a source of happiness to others.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Instead of lamenting your fate, create your world.

Helmut Schmidt

Politicians and journalists share the same fate in that they often understand tomorrow the things they talk about today.

Hector Elizondo

Which reminds me of a fortune cookie: you often find your destiny on the path you take to avoid it.

P. J. O'Rourke

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

Plato

All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.

Paul Zane Pilzer

It is thus hardly surprising that so many of the great minds in recent history have concerned themselves with economic matters. Indeed, they have come to regard economic theory in precisely the same way the ancient philosophers viewed the heavens - as the key to understanding and controlling our fate.

Martin Schulz

Refugees cost us money too when they come to us. If we improve their living conditions in Turkey, we create an incentive for them to stay there and not to place their fates in the hands of smugglers.

Laini Taylor

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

Laini Taylor

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Lisa See

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.