Phrases Quotes

• Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

  Ronald Reagan

  Freedom, Military, Moving

  Remarks to state chairs of National White House Conference on Small Business, 15 Aug. 1986

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• You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

  Charles A. Beard

  Life, Father, Struggle

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• But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

  George Eliot

  Philosophy, Mean, Experience

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.683, Oxford Paperbacks

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• You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of our society now, these phrases, introvert and extrovert, where it actually came from.

  Michael Fassbender

  Teacher, Drama, School

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. March 8, 2011.

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• I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

  Oscar Wilde

  Existence, Epigrams

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

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• Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

  Gilbert Highet

  Intimate Conversation, Dancing, Needs

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• Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

  James Bryant Conant

  Tyrants, Political, Magic

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• The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

  Stephen Colbert

  Grief, Mean, Thinking

  Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.playboy.com. October 16, 2012.

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• Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Inspirational, Sad, Regret

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Cat's Cradle: A Novel”, p.279, Dial Press

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• I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

  John Green

  Love, Dream, Lying

  "Looking for Alaska". Book by John Green, 2005.

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• I want to go to there.

  Tina Fey

  Funny, Desire, Want

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• Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.

  Alex Trebek

  Answers, Form, Please

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• Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?

  Louis XIV

  Death, Kings, Thinking

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• I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lonely, Heart, Moon

  Virginia Woolf (1976). “The Waves”, Chatto & Windus

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• Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

  Anne McCaffrey

  Writing, Vocabulary, Style

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• Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- citizen of the world -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.

  Strobe Talbott

  Country, Real, Believe

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• Leukemia is evidently psychosomatic in origin and at least eight cases of leukemia had been treated successfully by Dianetics after medicine had traditionally given up. The source of leukemia has been reported to be an engram containing the phrase 'It turns my blood to water.'

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Medicine, Eight, Blood

  Journal of Scientology, Issue 15-G, 1953.

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• The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  People, World, Levels

  "The Crisis of the Tax State" (1918)

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• For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.

  Lucretius

  And Love, Sound, Ears

  Lucretius (2008). “On the Nature of the Universe”, p.90, OUP Oxford

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• I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: 'a long time ago, in the future.' Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future.

  Romeo LeBlanc

  Children, Long, Inuit

  Address to the Empire Club and the Royal Commonwealth Society, June 26, 1996.

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• Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!

  Rollo May

  Movement, Starting, Interest

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

  Neil Postman

  Creating, Use, Definitions

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.27, Penguin

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• Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you’re timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all.

  Saul Bass

  Ideas, Bass, Kind

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• Nudity is a state of fact; lewdity, to coin a phrase, is a state of mind

  Paul Outerbridge

  Mind, Coins, Facts

  Paul Outerbridge, Jeannine Fiedler (1993). “Paul Outerbridge Jr: photographs”

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• Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about.

  Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

  Night, Thinking, Doe

  Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (2012). “Molly Make-Believe”, p.7, The Floating Press

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