Phrases Quotes - Page 20

Let us make war on the phrase 'violence doesn't solve anything.' It is a lie, and anyone who utters it cannot be taken morally seriously.

Dennis Prager

War, Lying, Taken

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There are times when phrases such as 'totally astonished' just don't do the job. I am of course delighted and honoured and, needless to say, flabbergasted.

Terry Pratchett

Jobs, Courses, Delighted

"A dubbing for creating a flat world on top of a turtle" by Sam Jones, www.theguardian.com. December 30, 2008.

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There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.

Andy Grove

Senior, Zero, Devil

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Control of the tongue! Vital for the man who would try to tread the Path, for no harsh or unkind word, no hasty impatient phrase, may escape from the tongue which is consecrated to service, and which must not injure even an enemy; for that which wounds has no place in the Kingdom of Love.

Annie Besant

Men, Enemy, Trying

Annie Besant (1943). “Daily meditations on the path and its qualifications: from the works of Annie Besant”

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Using the phrase business ethics might imply that the ethical rules and expectations are somehow different in business than in other contexts. There really is no such thing as business ethics. There is just ethics and the challenge for people in business and every other walk in life to acknowledge and live up to basic moral principles like honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and caring.

Michael Josephson

Honesty, Responsibility, Caring

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Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.

Alice Thomas Ellis

Book, Thinking, Mad

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In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.

I. A. Richards

Two, Together, Different

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To use words and phrases in an easygoing manner without scrutinizing them too curiously is not in general a mark of ill-breeding. On the contrary, there is something low-bred in being too precise. But sometimes there is no help for it

Socrates

Use, Helping, Sometimes

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I love women who are bosses and who don't constantly worry about what their employees think of them. I love women who don't ask, "Is that OK?" after everything they say. I love when women are courageous in the face of unthinkable circumstances, like my mother when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Or like Gabrielle Giffords writing editorials for the New York Times about the cowardice of Congress regarding gun laws and using phrases like "mark my words" like she is Clint Eastwood. How many women say stuff like that?

Mindy Kaling

Mother, New York, Cancer

"Lena Dunham Hilariously, Candidly Interviews Mindy Kaling". Interview with Lena Dunham, www.rollingstone.com. November 11, 2013.

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I really wish there had been a way to phrase this as 'A thunder of worms.' Because I like that phrase. That's a phrase with soul. Worm thunder on the horizon, all is right with the cosmos.

Ursula Vernon

Soul, Wish, Cosmos

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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

Alain de Botton

Justice, Definitions, Window

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If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded-painfully-the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint. ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises.

Bruce McCall

Attitude, Pride, Ideas

Bruce McCall (1999). “Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada”, Vintage

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The first phrase of the First Amendment spoke to the freedom uppermost in Jefferson's mind when it provided that, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Here a double guarantee could be found: first, that government would do nothing to give official endorsement to a religion or to set one faith above another; second, that government would do nothing to inhibit the freedom of religion.

Edwin Gaustad

Exercise, Government, Law

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The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.

John Gresham Machen

Sound, Matter, Controversial

John Gresham Machen (1923). “Christianity and Liberalism”, p.1, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.

Albert J. Nock

Coins, Sometimes, Politician

"Free Speech and Plain Language". The Atlantic Monthly, January 1936.

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People who believe in 'universal health care' show remarkably little interest - usually none - in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada. For one thing, 'universal health care' in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days.

Thomas Sowell

Country, Believe, Mean

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Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for Him that He needs to have done - run errands for Him, carry messages for Him, fight on His side, feed His lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for Him that you need to do - sing songs for Him, tell Him what's on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in Him.

Frederick Buechner

Running, Song, Mean

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It's funny, because I don't think of my films as "slow-burn." I don't even know if I was familiar with the phrase until people started labeling me with it.

Ti West

Thinking, People, Film

Source: www.avclub.com

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Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music. You've heard the expression, music of the spheres? Well, that's a very literal phrase. In the Gospels, we read, "And the Lord God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul." That 'breath of life' to me is the music of life and it permeates every fiber of creation.

Michael Jackson

Believe, Men, Dust

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As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears.

Steve Rushin

Pregnancy, Games, Progress

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For time not only moves inexorable forward, as the underlying grid to our personal chronicle, but is manipulated by our psychic needs and natures into various images of timelessness and timeliness. Transient moments suddenly expand, visions of infinity intervene, notes and phrases become outlets of fantasy, escape, recollection, or omen. The music travels on two planes, chronological time and psychological time. Both planes are essential and must be abundantly represented.

Russell Sherman

Moving, Psychics, Two

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Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the practice room was that if any one route to any one phrase didn't work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as counterintuitive as that often seemed.

Renee Fleming

Opposites, Practice, Important

Renee Fleming (2005). “The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer”, p.56, Penguin

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It was the Spice Girls who messed it all up. And obviously, the appropriating of the phrase "girl power", which at that point overrode any notion of feminism, and which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends.

Caitlin Moran

Girl, Feminism, Spices

"Caitlin Moran: how to be a Renaissance woman" by Vanessa Thorpe, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2015.

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If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas-whatever can animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. [19]In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict.

A. C. Bradley

Spiritual, Struggle, Mean

A. C. Bradley (2016). “Shakespearean Tragedy”, p.19, A. C. Bradley

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Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'

Antonin Scalia

Mean, Errors, Government

Antonin Scalia (2016). “Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents”, p.239, Regnery Publishing

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