Famous Quotes & Sayings

Michael Ignatieff

The [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.

Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts ... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.

Michael Barone

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal.

Ravi Zacharias

As I see our world, I have never seen greater confusion, greater loss of meaning, greater uncertainty, and greater fear of what looms in front of us. Politics has gotten out of control everywhere. Nobody sees a mascot or a leader, and everyone wants to know what really lies ahead here.

Ray Bradbury

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

Ray Bradbury

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

Ray Bradbury

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?

Ray Bradbury

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Ray Bradbury

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.

Ray Bradbury

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

Randy Savage

Wrestling is a fraternity, and the boys will work their butts off for you as long as you respect them and don't lie. You can't anyone walk all over you or everybody will walk all over you.

Randy Pausch

Most people who have told a lie think they got away with it … when in fact, they didn’t

Randy Pausch

People lie for lots of reasons, often because it seems like a way to get what they want with less effort.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

You never feel good when you lie. It doesn't matter how much you want something, if you lie to somebody you love, and they actually, sincerely believe you, you feel like a cockroach that needs some serious Raid action.

Ralph Nader

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally. . . . Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out. . . . Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

It is a lie that to talk to Hispanics you have to talk about amnesty. Let me tell you, the only Hispanics that are in favor of amnesty are the illegals.

Shay Mitchell

You lie when you're a teenager, I think, because your parents are treating you like you're younger and you - in your mind - think that you're so much older. You make up all of these lies because you think it's what you should do.

Sheena Iyengar

The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered.

Sharon Shinn

And you're not leaving," she said. "Promise me." It was as if she had asked him to promise to keep breathing, to notice sunshine, to permit the spinning of the earth. What choice did he have? Even if he left her, she would be camped in his heart, an insistent and willful presence. She would match her strides to his on any journey he ever took; she would lie beside him on any bed. Amalie, he said, "that's the easiest promise I've ever had to make.

Mick Jagger

Dandelions don't tell no lies...

Michael Peterson

Don't lie, then you can look the whole world in the eye.

Michael Pollan

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Michael Leunig

Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It’s as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives...

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

Sholom Aleichem

Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose.

Sherman Alexie

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.

Sherman Alexie

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

Seth Grahame-Smith

Contrary to his infallibly "honest" image, Abe wasn't above lying so long as it served a noble purpose.