Famous Quotes & Sayings

Pearl S. Buck

Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be ...

Peter Straub

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

Peter Thiel

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

Peter L. Berger

Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.

Peter Porter

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Tanith Lee

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

Rosamund Pike

In the original computer game of Doom, you not only have to kill things. You have to pulverise them.

Ugo Betti

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

Ulrich Beck

In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible.

Richard Dawkins

Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

Robert Neelly Bellah

We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.

Richard Hofstadter

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.

Rebecca West

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

Thomas Paine

The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.

Thomas Huxley

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?

Thomas E. Mann

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Thomas Sowell

Our fate is matched by the total freedom we have to react to our fate. It is as if we were dealt a hand of card. Once we have them, we are free to play them as we choose.

Thomas Sowell

The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

Thomas Sowell

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Richard Lugar

Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

Sri Aurobindo

Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.

Sri Aurobindo

The soul in man is greater than his fate...

Roger McGough

I could never begin a poem: 'When I am dead' In case it tempted Fate, and Fate gave way.

Thomas Mann

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

Tom Shales

By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.

Steven Spielberg

Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.

Stefan Zweig

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

Stefan Zweig

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born.

Stefan Zweig

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.

Thomas Gray

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the good how far,-but far above the great.

Thomas Gray

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.

Thomas Hardy

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

Thomas Hardy

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.