Famous Quotes & Sayings

Terry Pratchett

There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.

Terry Pratchett

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

Terry Gilliam

Because I dislike being quoted I lie almost constantly when talking about my work.

Terry Gross

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

Terry Eagleton

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

Terry Eagleton

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

Terry Eagleton

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

Terry Goodkind

...Wizard's Fifth Rule: Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.

Terry Goodkind

People are stupid. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.

Terry Brooks

Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, Their desire to live in peace, Their courage to seek out truth, Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.

Tennessee Williams

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

Tennessee Williams

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

Terence McKenna

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

Tony Blair

How do we deal with not just the acts of violence, but the extremist ideology that lies behind them? Because though the numbers of fanatics that go and join and kill for a group like ISIS are measured in tens of thousands, those that support the wider ideology, I'm afraid, you measure in tens of millions or more.

Sinead O'Connor

When you dishonor the the utter glory and majesty of black people, you lie. Your heart lies to you and you let it

Simone de Beauvoir

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

Simone de Beauvoir

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

Simone de Beauvoir

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

Simone de Beauvoir

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

Simone Weil

The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.

Simone Weil

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

Simone Weil

In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.

Simone Weil

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

Simone Weil

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Simone Weil

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Simon Pegg

I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.

Rick Riordan

Chiron probably wanted me to say, Heck it wa nothing. I eat hellhounds for breakfast. But I didn't feel like lying.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

In all cases of slander currency, whenever the forger of the lie is not to be found, the injured parties should have a right to come on any of the indorsers.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

When of a gossiping circle it was asked, "What are they doing?" The answer was, "Swapping lies.

Renata Adler

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

Rem Koolhaas

The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.

Richard Branson

Most people assume that a record shop's success lies in selling records. In fact, Virgin's success both in mail order and the record shops lay in skill at buying records.

Swami Vivekananda

He who is the servant of all is their true master. He never becomes a leader in whose love there is a consideration of high or low. He whose love knows no end and never stops to consider high or low has the whole world lying at his feet.