Fifty Quotes - Page 23

• A. T. Stewart started life with a dollar and fifty cents. This merchant prince began by calling at the doors of houses in order to sell needles, thread and buttons. He soon found the people did not want them, and his small stock was thrown back on his hands. Then he said wisely, "I'll not buy any more of these goods, but I'll go and ask people what they do want." Thereafter he studied the needs and desires of people, found out just what they most wanted, endeavored to meet those wants, and became the greatest business man of his time.

  Grenville Kleiser

  Business, Men, Hands

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• When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

  Carl Sagan

  Block, Molecules, Different

  Carl Sagan (2006). “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God”, p.76, Penguin

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• Fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan. Today it's called the PGA Tour.

  Alex Hay

  Funny, Inspiring, Golf

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• The rich man has his motorcar, His country and his town estate, He smokes a fifty-cent cigar And jeers at Fate. He frivols through the livelong day, He knows not Poverty, her pinch. His lot seems light, his heart seems gay; He has a cinch. Yet though my lamp burns low and dim, Though I must slave for livelihood- Think you that I would change with him? You bet I would!

  Franklin P. Adams

  Change, Country, Heart

  FRANKLIN P ADAMS (1911). “TOBOGGANING ON PARNASSUS”

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• What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to p*ss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?

  Steve Buscemi

  Retirement, Years, Office

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• When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.

  Prue Leith

  Sex, Two, Important

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• Fifty percent of life in the NBA is sex. The other 50 percent is money.

  Dennis Rodman

  Basketball, Sex, Nba

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• You could buy my book in a paperback edition for a dollar, and in hard covers for $3.50. And for fifty cents extra, I come around to your house personally and wet your finger while you're turning the pages.

  Bob Hope

  Funny, Book, Reading

  Bob Hope (2004). “Bob Hope”, Hyperion

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• You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single....brilliant. Perhaps the most...brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche...or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.

  Rachel Cohn

  Song, Sex, Growing Up

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• I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.

  Tamar Myers

  Optimistic, Way, Gains

  Tamar Myers (2008). “As the World Churns”, p.82, NYLA

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• Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Years, Two, America

  "The Case for Reparations". www.theatlantic.com.

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• Fifty million people die every year, six thousand die every hour, and over one hundred people die every minute. But when thousands of people die in the same place and at the same time, we are more likely to wonder why God would allow such a thing to happen.

  Steve Farrar

  Christian, Inspiration, Years

  Steve Farrar (2010). “God Built”, p.161, David C Cook

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• One hundred and fifty years ago the vacant lands of the West were opened to private use. One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act, probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted. Under the impetus of that Act and other laws, more than 1.1 billion acres of the original public main have been transferred to private and non-federal public ownership. The 768 million acres remaining in federal ownership are a valuable national asset.

  John F. Kennedy

  Years, Law, Land

  "John F. Kennedy: 1961 : containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, January 20 to December 31, 1961" by John F. Kennedy, Washington: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1962.

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• Mr. Gandhi, you have been working fifteen hours a day for fifty years. Don't you think you should take a vacation?" Gandhi smiled and replied, "I am always on vacation.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Passion, Thinking

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• Great teams are usually small-under fifty in total head count. (There are few examples of a team made up of hundreds of people who created anything revolutionary.) Big teams aren't conducive to revolutionary products because such products require a high degree of single-mindedness, unity, and unreasonable passion.

  Guy Kawasaki

  Team, Passion, People

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• America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Hope, Men, Discovery

  The Oxford History of the American People ch. 2 (1965)

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• Fruit of all the kinds that the country produced were laid before him; he ate very little, but from time to time a liquor prepared from cocoa, and of an aphrodisiac nature, as we were told, was presented to him in golden cups... I observed a number of jars, above fifty, brought in, filled with foaming chocolate of which he took some.

  Bernal Diaz del Castillo

  Country, Numbers, Chocolate

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• The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public's thoughts and actions is likewise expensive.

  Edward Bernays

  Government, Hands, Leader

  Edward L. Bernays (1930). “Propaganda”

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• The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Jealous, Fighting

  Sir Winston Churchill, Andrew Scotland (1965). “Churchill on men and events: a selection from "Thoughts and adventures" and "Great contemporaries"”

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• Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

  Allan Gurganus

  Years, Lasts, Firsts

  Allan Gurganus (2010). “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel”, p.399, Vintage

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• Few men have led a more active life - bodily or mentally - from a constitutional anxiety for regularity, precision, and order, during fifty years' business career, from which I had retired.

  William Banting

  Men, Order, Years

  William Banting (1864). “Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public”, p.10

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• Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1986). “Science, Computers, and People: From the Tree of Mathematics”

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• True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero-really look-and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Life, Religious, Real

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.77, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Today, I am wondering what would have happened to me by now, if, fifty years ago, some fluent talker had converted me to the theory of the eight-hour day and convinced me that it was not fair to my fellow-workers to put forth my best efforts in my work? I am glad that the eight-hour day had not been invented when I was a young man. If my life had been made up of eight-hour days, I don't believe I could have accomplished a great deal.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Life, Country, Work

  "Along Broadway: The Edison Musical Magazine".

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• It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

  Gregory Bateson

  Years, Sphinx, Riddle

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