Classic Quotes - Page 38

• When you have a regime that would be happier in the afterlife than in this life, this is not a regime that is subject to classic theories of deterrence.

  John Bolton

  Afterlife, Would Be, Regimes

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• This is so classic. Government comes along under the guise of fairness, fixes something, gonna make it fair, gonna make it equal, gonna make it affordable, maybe even make it free. What they end up doing is blowing it all to hell, screwing it up worse than it's ever been screwed up, then their voters bellyache and complain about it. And the same Democrats come back and demand that something be done, because their voters need a second chance.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Second Chance, Government, Done

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• My rule is always if you keep your basics classic. You can add seasonable and very trendy stuff and always look modern and updated, but if you're questioning something and its expensive, err on the side of classic.

  Melissa Rivers

  Sides, Add, Looks

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I'm drawn to the classic antihero, the guy who's probably made a bunch of mistakes and really has the capacity to go either way. That's the most interesting type of character for me to watch, to see what decisions they'll make. There's a lot of gray area there for a writer to explore.

  Kurt Sutter

  Mistake, Character, Interesting

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• The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

  George Eliot

  Hero, Years, Land

  Daniel Deronda bk. 6, ch. 42 (1876)

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• By the eighties, a lot of radio stations had started playing "Sixties" music. They called it "Classic Rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music.

  Dave Barry

  Rocks, Upset, Radio

  Dave Barry (1991). “Turning 40”, Vintage

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• After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.

  Tom Hooper

  Fire, Land, Enemy

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• The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

  Matthew Arnold

  Latin, Character, Greek

  Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868)

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• This notion that's peddled by the religious right - that they are oppressed is not true. Sometimes it's a cynical ploy to move their agenda ahead. The classic example being that somehow secularists are trying to eliminate Christmas, which strikes me as some kind of manufactured controversy.

  Barack Obama

  Religious, Moving, Cynical

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• I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust - a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Emotional, Two, Foundation

  Letter to August Derleth (1929), in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 307), 1996.

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• Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.

  Mervyn Peake

  Age, Three, World

  Mervyn Peake (1995). “The Gormenghast Novels”, Overlook Books

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• In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Smart, Book, School

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• The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Sex, Revenge

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• The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

  Edmund White

  School, Italian, Past

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.102, Pan Macmillan

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• [The poll tax] was a classic case of a good idea being entrusted to Chris Patten and becoming a terrible failure.

  Norman Tebbit

  Ideas, Becoming, Polls

  BBC, November 16, 2000.

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• Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle" is a guy whose asshole is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.

  L. Neil Smith

  Dog, Guy, Soul

  "The Bad Guys". April 28, 2009.

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• For most of us, the classic test of willpower is resisting temptation, whether the temptress is a doughnut, a cigarette, a clearance sale, or a one-night stand. When people say, "I have no willpower," what they usually mean is, "I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or (fill in your anatomical part) wants to say yes.

  Kelly McGonigal

  Heart, Mean, Night

  Kelly McGonigal (2011). “The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It”, p.14, Penguin

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• It is?classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines.

  David Maraniss

  Reading, Lines, Bills

  1995 On President Clinton's letter as a graduate student, 3 Dec 1969, to arrange RO TC enlistment to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War, a position that was to haunt his future campaigning. First in His Class.

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• Michael made his debut in John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic, Halloween, possibly the best scare movie to come along in the last twenty-five years. With the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) movie to bear the Halloween moniker, we see how far the mighty have fallen. In the final analysis, The Curse of Michael Myers is a horrific motion picture just not in the way the film makers intended.

  James Berardinelli

  Halloween, Years, Scare

  "Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers". Movie Review, www.reelviews.net. 1995.

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• Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.

  James P. Womack

  Cutting, Inventory, Way

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• Benedict (Cumberbatch, who is playing Sherlock) looks amazing. He's still got a Sherlockian silhouette, with a large overcoat, but in a classic cut. Watson dresses with an urban elegance, a touch of old school dashing, giving a feeling of both the military and medical profession. I suppose it's something they have in common as well. They're a bit metrosexual.

  Martin Freeman

  Military, Old School, Cutting

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• Music gives me a lot of peace, either classic music with its structure or the spontaneity of Miles Davis. It brings the best in you.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Giving, Spontaneity, Structure

  "Mohamed ElBaradei: What I've Learned" by John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. January 31, 2011.

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• I believe - to the best of my recollection, anyway - that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Drinking, Believe, Moving

  "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown", www.cnn.com. September 29, 2013.

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• It's easy to sell good news like this, and the authors confidently rely on classic fallacious arguments. They argue by declaration, which is what makes the books so amusing. In matter-of-fact, authoritative tones, the authors tell us how plants and human beings exchange energy - or they describe what angels look like, whether or how they're sexed, how they communicate with human beings, and how they differ from ghosts. Readers might be expected to wonder, How do they know?

  Wendy Kaminer

  Book, Angel, Atheism

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• In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

  Toni Morrison

  Baby, Play, Differences

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