Might Have Been Quotes - Page 15

• Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there's no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that.

  Jared Diamond

  Years, Acting, Twenties

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• It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.

  J. B. Priestley

  Children, Piano, Keys

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• Keeping small nations enslaved because of the deals between the great nations or because of any pragmatic considerations that might have been there are totally unacceptable.

  Mikhail Saakashvili

  Might, Consideration, Deals

  "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer", www.edition.cnn.com. May 8, 2005.

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• The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

  Milton Friedman

  Garden, Government, Investing

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• There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.

  Winston Churchill

  Jobs, War, Men

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• I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Cat, Eye, Nursing

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• If I had been a winger, I might have been daydreaming and thinking about how to keep my kit clean for next week.

  Bill Beaumont

  Thinking, Next Week, Might

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• A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Character, Law, Quality

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, Arthur Walter Burks (1960). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce : Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss: Principles of philosophy and Elements of logic”

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• How different South Africa’s cricketing achievements, and indeed the future of the country itself, might have been if racism had not denied Frank Roro the opportunity of batting with Bruce Mitchell in the Lord’s sunshine.

  Richard Lloyd

  Country, Sunshine, Opportunity

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• This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

  Susanna Kaysen

  Girl, Titles, Would Be

  Girl, Interrupted (1993)

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• Ya know, Hitler was this evil, evil man. But with the World Bank and Israel manipulating America, he might have been on to something.

  Zach Braff

  Men, Israel, America

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• Had it been published by a voice from heaven, that twelve poor men, taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross, it might have been thought an illusion against all reason of men; yet we know it was undertaken and accomplished by them.

  Stephen Charnock

  Taken, Men, Voice

  Stephen Charnock (2013). “The Existence and Attributes of God”, p.678, Ravenio Books

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• Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

  Stephen Potter

  Book, Should Have, Might

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• No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.

  Aldrich Ames

  Knowing, Arms, Might

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• Life is too short to dwell on what might have been.

  Hillary Clinton

  Success, Life Is Too Short, Might

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• Harry looked around; there was Ginny running toward him; she had a hard blazing look in her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her. After several long moments, or it might have been half an hour-or possibly several sunlit days- they broke apart.

  J. K. Rowling

  Running, Thinking, Worry

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• Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.

  Edmund Gosse

  Thinking, Errors, Parent

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• All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Children, Opportunity, Soul

  Vladimir Nabokov (2010). “Lolita”, p.12, Vintage

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• Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.

  Ogden Nash

  Long, Progress, Gone

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• However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today.

  Bob Filner

  California, Statistics, Might

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• The key to the match might have been his serving. Maybe I should have concentrated harder on watching them go by me, I don't know.

  Andy Roddick

  Should Have, Keys, Tennis

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• All I asked for was equality and independence. A rotating chairmanship might have been the answer.

  D. J. Enright

  Independence, Answers, Might

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• On this day there was soon wind enough and to spare. The same might have been said of the sea. The Spray was in the midst of the turbulent Gulf Stream itself. She was jumping like a porpoise over the uneasy waves

  Joshua Slocum

  Jumping, Wind, Sea

  Joshua Slocum (2015). “Sailing Alone Around the World”, p.176, Booklassic

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• The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.

  Donald Harington

  Writing, New Orleans, Justice

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• I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman

  Anais Nin

  Believe, Thinking, Wife

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