Sideshows Quotes

• I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Nerd, Biting, Sound

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• I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

  Ray Bradbury

  Space, Individuality, Dinosaurs

  FaceBook post by Ray Bradbury from Sep 24, 2015

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• I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

  Ralph Ellison

  Life, Glasses, Mirrors

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.28, Vintage

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• I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

  Ralph Ellison

  People, Black History, African American

  Invisible Man prologue (1952)

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• The general public thinks all little people are in circuses or sideshows. We have doctors, nurses, just about every field covered.

  Billy Barty

  Thinking, Doctors, Nurse

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Ideas aren't a sideshow that make our factory a little more valuable. Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable!

  Seth Godin

  Ideas, Littles, Factories

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• You can't handle the truth!

  Jack Nicholson

  Movie, Memorable, Great Year

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• I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

  Ralph Ellison

  Men, Hollywood, Invisible

  1952 Invisible Man, prologue.

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• I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

  Ralph Ellison

  Men, People, Black History

  Invisible Man prologue (1952)

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• Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Cutting, Emotional, Humans

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• We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.

  Terence McKenna

  Greek, Events, Human Experience

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• Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!

  Paddy Chayefsky

  Football, Player, Boredom

  "The Screenplays: The Hospital; Network; Altered states".

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• Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Retirement, Jobs, Hard Work

  Robert A. Heinlein (1988). “To Sail Beyond the Sunset”

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• I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Keys, Possessing

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• So far as the colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we don't know what is going on in the main tent: and I don't want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions.

  Woodrow Wilson

  College, Swallowing, Circus

  "The Priceless Gift - The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson".

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• The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

  Michael Scheuer

  Country, War, Islamic

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Writing, Men, Misery

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• Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man's home is his castle. Donald Trump's career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea party sideshow.

  Michelle Malkin

  Party, Home, Men

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• We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.

  Dave Eggers

  Strong, Stars, Oddities

  Dave Eggers (2013). “A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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• What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Dull, Thieves, Pretentious

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “The Rum Diary: Film Tie-in Edition”, p.72, A&C Black

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• I also visited several healing meetings... and became angry with what appeared to be the manipulation of people for the material gains of the faith healer... Dressing like sideshow barkers. Pushing people over and calling it the power of God. And money - they were always asking for more, leading people to believe that if they gave they would be healed.

  John Wimber

  Believe, Healing, People

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• Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks.

  Jonathan Winters

  Elephants, Purpose, Gone

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• But if you're coming off ACL surgery, you don't need to be having a press conference at OTAs. Every week? Really? It becomes a circus, a sideshow. It takes away from the focus of what those sessions are supposed to be about: the team.

  Donovan McNabb

  Team, Focus, Needs

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• Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear.

  Robert Ardrey

  Sex, Fear, Animal

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• If the euro zone doesn't come up with a comprehensive vision of its own future, you'll have a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union. And, frankly, questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow compared to the rise of political populism.

  Nick Clegg

  Political, Vision, Movement

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