Famous Quotes & Sayings

Allan Bloom

The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

Alison Lurie

America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the world as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land.

Alison Lurie

Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.

Ann Druyan

By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves,

Ann Landers

Maintaining self-respect in the face of a devastating experience is of prime importance.

Ann Brashares

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

Ann Brashares

So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction. Lena Kaligaris

Ann Brashares

Polly was pretty good at dieting, all right, but she was beginning to wonder whether you ever lost the parts of your self that you wanted to lose.

Ann Brashares

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

Ann Brashares

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

Ann Coulter

What's curious about the left's current obsession with Timothy McVeigh is that it proves that - despite a frantic search for 15 years - liberals have come across no better evidence of burgeoning "right-wing extremist" violence than a drug-taking, self-described "agnostic" who was thrown out of the Michigan Militia and who proclaimed, "Science is my religion." That sounds more like Bill Maher than Rush Limbaugh.

Ann Coulter

Just as we're always told that schoolyard bullies are actually deeply insecure, liberals rationalize their own ferocious behavior by claiming to have been wounded somehow. What about the little guy our poor, insecure bully is beating the living daylights out of? How's his self-esteem coming along? That is the essence of liberals: They viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they are the victims.

Ann Coulter

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.

Andrea Dworkin

Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.

Andrea Dworkin

On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.

Andrea Bocelli

I don't have an extraordinary degree of self-confidence, but I know the gift I have been given from God and I try to share it with as many people as possible. Having a great voice is not a merit. I don't think it is a merit.

Amy Winehouse

And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote.

Aesop

The gods help them who help themselves.

Jane Austen

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

Jane Austen

From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.

Jane Austen

He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed....

Jane Austen

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

James Wolk

No one ever judges their own self.

Jason Biggs

Getting married has shifted my focus, in such a profound way. You just realize, "Oh, I can't be so selfish anymore. There's someone else."

Jason Alexander

Acting is not terribly important work, and I have always felt a bit of guilt about pursuing something that is so selfish. I love doing it, but it is never something that feels like it's going to change or save the world.

Janos Kadar

I address myself to the Communists, to those Communists who were prompted to join the Party by the progressive ideas of mankind and socialism, and not by selfish personal interests - let us represent our pure and just ideas by pure and just means.

Janos Kadar

Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to leave.

Janis Ian

Some people would rather stay ignorant and self-satisfied.

Janis Joplin

Don't compromise your self, you're all you got.

Jared Diamond

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

Janet Jackson

The greatest achievement to any human being is to love God, yourself, and others.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

Jane Smiley

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.