We’ve collected the best Were Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Nelson Mandela, Nushrat Bharucha, Raymond Chandler, Marianne Williamson, Isaac Asimov. Use them as an inspiration.
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Philanthropy is involved with basic innovations that transform society, not simply maintaining the status quo or filling basic social needs that were formerly the province of the public sector.
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All the men in my family were bearded, and most of the women.
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If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present.
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Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what ‘was’ and ‘were,’ we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.
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We may not know what each day has in store for us. We could be gone tomorrow. Any minute could truly be our goodbye. But we do have this moment. This time. Today. Right now. It takes way more effort to shell out hate then it does to allow love to flow freely in our lives. After all, it’s what we were born to do.
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When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.
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Vulnerability is the strongest state to be in. How boring would it be if we were constantly dominant or constantly submissive?
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It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
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My mom and dad are from the streets. My mom’s from Chicago. My dad’s from Memphis. My dad got out of school and got with my mom. They were hustlers. They were from the streets. They were doing their thing. The streets ain’t got no love for the streets. You can light up the streets, or be a victim of the streets.
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If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.
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Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.
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Even when we talked about child labor, we were frowned upon. But then you know that you have to speak the truth irrespective of the repercussions.
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The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it’s still our deepest longing – but it’s now also our deepest fear.
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If I weren’t doing what I’m doing today… I’d be traveling around the world on the back of a motorcycle.
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I grew up with an incredibly loving and supportive family that gave me the impression there were a lot of options for me out there.
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The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.
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Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
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For those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we are grateful that such men and women were among us. For those who continue to serve, we honor their commitment. For those who return to civilian life, we honor their service.
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I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
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‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
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All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature.
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If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.
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I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.
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The idea of a spiritual heart transplant is a vivid image to me; once you have the heart of somebody else inside you, then that heart is there. Jesus‘ heart is inside me, and my heart is gone. So if God were to place a stethoscope against my chest, he would hear the heart of Jesus Christ beating.
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I’m an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30’s. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.
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I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just – there wasn’t a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.
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I don’t feel like millions of people are wrong because they love who they love or they were born how they were born.
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I grew up in the ghetto, and the thing is when there were problems, I knew when to get away.
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Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a person as if he were where he could be and should be, and he will become what he could be and should be.
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The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
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The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives.
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Both my mom and dad were models.
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I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.
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In my case, I can sincerely say that nothing is impossible… When I was saying I want to be No. 1 of the world, and I was seven or eight years old, most of the people were laughing at me because it seems like I have one percent of chances to do that, and I’ve done it.
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If it were a fact, it wouldn’t be called intelligence.
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If I were in a room full of people, I’d rather be the person who is more interesting than the one who is wallpaper.
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I believe that every single one of us, celebrity or not, has a responsibility to get involved in trying to make a difference in the world. Our generation faces many challenges, some of which were passed on to us by the past generations, but it’s up to us to find solutions today so that we don’t keep passing our problems on.
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There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
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See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
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I chose as my target the University of Mississippi, which in 1960 was the holiest temple of white supremacy in America, next to the U.S. Capitol and the White House, both of which were under the control of segregationists and their collaborators.
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There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.
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No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
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Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
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We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.
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You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’
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Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends.
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Never be discouraged. If I were sunk in the lowest pits of Nova Scotia, with the Rocky Mountains piled on me, I would hang on, exercise faith, and keep up good courage, and I would come out on top.
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If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never never never!
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I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
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Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.
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If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t they never were.
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The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.
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Along the way, let’s never forget that once we were children and that we were all playing together without distinction of skin color, society level, or where people come from. Adults need to remember to play and to be more childlike in our behavior. We’ve forgotten what that childlike experience was like.
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I come from a long line of strong and confident women out of New Orleans. My grandmother and great-grandmother were women who ran their homes and were leaders in their communities. I was never taught that there was anything that I couldn’t do, and I believed that.
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After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It’s almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.
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My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
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Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.
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Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s Paradise.
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My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.
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History and social sciences were my interests. I was always interested in knowing how societies get organized, why there is rich and poor divide, why there are classes. I was never apolitical. I think we are all political in a way. Politics decides our day-to-day life.
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Oprah‘s got good politics, she’s got a good heart, and she’ll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we’re Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
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Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.
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Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.
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When I was a kid, nobody in my family had a car. And I didn’t have many toys. The only toys I had were the ones I would steal.
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In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, ‘I have just lost the love of my life.’
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Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.
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Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.
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If a projectile were deprived of the force of gravity, it would not be deflected toward the earth but would go off in a straight line into the heavens and do so with uniform motion, provided that the resistance of the air were removed.
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My yachts were, I suppose, outstanding status symbols.
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No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.
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Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn’t even have when you were on your own.
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As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.
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There’s an examination for young people to go to university. I failed it three times. I failed a lot. So I applied to 30 different jobs and got rejected. I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘You’re no good.’ I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted.
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Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.
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I wanted to play saxophone, but all I could get were a few squeaks.
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My earliest memories of rap music was mixed with my earliest memories of reggae music. They were big sounds around the way, heavy bass lines, strong messages, definitely.
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If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
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The most valuable investment we can make is in our children’s education. When we make education a priority, we give our children opportunity. Opportunity to learn at higher levels than their parents were able to learn; to earn at higher levels than we were able to earn.
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If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
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You’ve got to know your limitations. I don’t know what your limitations are. I found out what mine were when I was twelve. I found out that there weren’t too many limitations, if I did it my way.
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I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It’s just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.
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If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
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Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.
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Mark Wahlberg, when I was in high school, people were like, ‘You look like Marky Mark!’ Then as I got older, they were like, ‘You look like Donnie Wahlberg.’ Now they’re like, ‘You look like Donnie Wahlberg’s cousin from Massachusetts.’
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Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I’m not going to do that. That takes away my power. I’m not going to compromise who I am.
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My parents were able to pay our expenses, but not for education. We were encouraged to work hard in school and get scholarships.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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I’ll never forget Hurricane Katrina – the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.
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If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
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My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.
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As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be good.
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Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
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Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.
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I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.
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Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
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Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.
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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
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To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
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The signing of the Sex Pistols was a turning point for Virgin. It put the company on the map and, over the years, attracted bands such as Genesis, the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, and Janet Jackson. It also attracted Culture Club, who were ground-breaking.
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It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world.
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People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes – whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.
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You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
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O! Desolated Scotland, too credulous of fair speeches, and not aware of the calamities which are coming upon you! If you were to judge as I do, you would not easily put your neck under a foreign yoke.
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If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.
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I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.
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Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
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Growing up, my parents were Roman Catholic – strict Catholics – from New Orleans. I understood the idea in the principle of spirituality. I noticed it in the stories that I read. The Trinity was something that was brought up consistently: the power of three. Things happened in threes, and I thought that was brilliant.
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I went out with some old friends and we were having fun. A couple of them were very intoxicated. When I went to leave, I refused to let them drive. So when I got pulled over, I was the driver.
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The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
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Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
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I looked up to my parents because they were very successful in what they wanted to do. I was lucky; I didn’t have to look far for role models.
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Shaquille and I kind of joke we were the Christopher Columbus of social media. We’re kind of out on a boat by ourselves going through these uncharted waters. But it’s become more understood, embraced and accepted, and now it’s pretty much expected by fans for athletes, leagues and teams to be there.
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There are two kinds of people… There are the dreamers who go and buy, and there are the doers who go and make. And I’ve always recognized that. So the dreamers are what support our company because they will buy the product that they could make if they wanted to, had time to, or were so inclined to.
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There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.
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A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?
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My mom and dad – they were always there. They were always on the set. They focused on our family life. The entertainment business wasn’t the end-all. They weren’t out to get the next big paycheck or the next big movie. It was about ‘What can we do as a family.’
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When I was younger, I had some close friends who always loved European football, and Real Madrid at that time were the dominant force. I remember family holidays when we used to go to Spain, and we’d bring back replica shirts of Real Madrid and pretend to be the players when we played in the park.
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The concept of The ‘Most Beautiful Moment in Life’, that was chapter one for us; it feels like that because we were starting from the bottom, but on this concept, ‘Love Yourself‘, we started to talk about some brighter things, like the real things in life.
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I think it’s difficult to say what exactly made me become a successful DJ. It depends on so many different things. If I were given an award, I would thank my family, friends, Tiesto and the great team behind me for all their support and hard work. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
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Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
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On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn’t observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.
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I liked St. Louis, when they were in the American League, because that was going home. I had all my family and friends there.
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Everyone has a dream deep in their heart, which is a center of what they want to do. If they had all the money, and they had the time and they were guaranteed that they’d be successful, that dream is what they would love to do.
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No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
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I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
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Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
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Life is a terminal condition. Were all going to die. Cancer patients just have more information, but we all, in some ways, wait for permission to live.
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In the household in which I was raised, the themes were pretty simple. ‘Work hard. Don’t quit. Be appreciative, be thankful, be grateful, be respectful. Also, never whine, never complain. And always, for crying out loud, keep a sense of humor.’
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Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn’t do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.
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I just wondered how things were put together.
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A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
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When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
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Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.
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If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
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Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.
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You weren’t born just to live a life and to die; you were born to accomplish something specifically. Matter of fact, success is making it to the end of your purpose; that is success… Success is not just existing. Success is making it to the end of why you were born.
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My brother and I were brought up outdoors. We appreciate the countryside; we appreciate nature and everything about it.
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Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
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People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation?
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We just were saying no more police brutality. And we had enough of police harassment in the Village and other places.
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One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts… to my surprise… almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.
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Today’s younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.
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My brother, a businessman, is the main cook in his home and my sister teaches cookery. Good food and good music were the mainstays of my childhood.
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Y’know, you can’t please all the people all the time… and last night, all those people were at my show.
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The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.
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If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
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The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.
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Charity bestowed upon those who are worthy of it is like good seed sown on a good soil that yields an abundance of fruits. But alms given to those who are yet under the tyrannical yoke of the passions are like seed deposited in a bad soil. The passions of the receiver of the alms choke, as it were, the growth of merits.
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There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her.
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It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.
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You can’t control where you were born, the family you were born into, what you look like; you can’t control any of those circumstances. The only thing you can control is how you react.
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I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
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There were no strategic mistakes that could affect Russia‘s history and it further development. No, there were no such mistakes. Tactical errors were made in some less significant options, problems and so on. But, on the whole, Russia embarked on a correct path and it changed.
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If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.
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We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.
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We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a ‘fresh‘ brain – one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.
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As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
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I’ve never met a funny person who wasn’t smart. I’ve met a lot of dramatic people who were stupid. But I’ve never met a funny person who wasn’t smart.
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What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.
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When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.
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If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
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I started ‘Outer Banks,’ because there’s so much hype around it. I saw one episode and I didn’t really continue, but I got to keep going at it. Two of the actors on there were also in ‘Stranger Things,’ and all my friends always ask, ‘Oh my God, you know Madelyn Cline. She was in ‘Stranger Things’ too.’
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Our teachers made such a difference – all my teachers and professors were very supportive and nurturing.
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If you think back to the first sporting event you went to, you don’t remember the score, you don’t remember a home run, you don’t remember a dunk. You remember who you were with. Were you with your mom, your dad, your brother, on a date?
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For each of us, life is a journey. Heavenly Father designed it for us out of love. Each of us has unique experiences and characteristics, but our journey began in the same place before we were born into this world.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
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Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
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It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
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Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
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My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.
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My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life – that is, to be happy.
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Growing up, I knew I was different. But I didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal. I just knew that I had a really big, extended family. I was taught nothing about who we were or where we came from.
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I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
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I constructed a laboratory in the neighborhood of Pike’s Peak. The conditions in the pure air of the Colorado Mountains proved extremely favorable for my experiments, and the results were most gratifying to me.
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Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
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In every age ‘the good old days‘ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
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Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness – and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
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Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
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I’m humble ’cause I think many years ago people say, ‘Well, Alibaba’s terrible company’. And I know we were not that terrible. We’re pretty good; we’re better than people thought. But today, when people have a high expectation on you, and I start to worry and nervous because we are not good yet.
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When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
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During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable country affords. My approach to Zionism was through Americanism.
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It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.
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I’ll say initially acting was my first love, and that’s what I pursued. But then, so far as even my first day on a film set, and just watching how things were set up, I just said, ‘I think I want to be in charge.’ I am very much type-A. I am a bit of a control freak.
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Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.
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I guess if there weren’t luck involved, I’d win ’em all.
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There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.
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If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.
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The groves were God’s first temples.
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In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.
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Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
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I grew up in a family with three siblings. My parents were always very supportive and encouraging. It was important for them that we have meaningful and satisfying professions, but they didn’t care as much about success and achievement.
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I was chef to the French Presidents between ’56 and ’59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn’t even see them.
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The Club Kids were about fun. Wild, messy fun – the more debauched, the better.
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
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All men were made by the Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers.
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There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.
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School shootings were invented by blacks… and stolen by the white man.
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I was born in Orange County – in Santa Ana. My dad is from California. I was raised on the East Coast. My first two years were in California, but I claim East Coast. I’m sorry, I don’t rep California.
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The Father willed that his blessed and glorious Son, whom he gave to us and who was born for us, should through his own blood offer himself as a sacrificial victim on the altar of the cross. This was to be done not for himself through whom all things were made, but for our sins.
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If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.
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When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.
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I acted all the way up until Princeton. It was just one of my favorite extracurricular activities. Then I got to Princeton and had a really conservative vibe. All my friends were planning on law school, med school, or Wall Street, and suddenly acting seem like a really risky proposition.
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If I were an animal, I would be an eagle.
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Behind that picture of me, thousands and thousands of people, they suffered – more than me. They died. They lost parts of their bodies. Their whole lives were destroyed, and nobody took that picture.
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It doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, your sexual preference, the region where you were born, your gender. We’re all equal… We can’t take certain minorities and think they have super powers and are different from the others.
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If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
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Anyone is free to judge me, but they weren’t there in my tough times.
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I tell students that the opportunities I had were a result of having a good educational background. Education is what allows you to stand out.
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Ah, if I were not king, I should lose my temper.
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I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I’ve gotten from so many of the adult elders.
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Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.
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I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience. That’s why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.
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A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
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I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
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Asian parents, or a lot of parents in general, they have no idea what goes on in this industry. Mine were born in the Philippines, where it’s different, because it is about who you know, and who knows what you have to do to get to the top? So they had a lot of that skepticism.
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Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.
408
I was at rock bottom for a year and a half – and the people who got me out of my rut were my fans.
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After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.
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I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny – because it’s powerful; it’s a threat.
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There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.
415
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
417
The problem with EMMA is that it is cost prohibitive for the small investors who were supposed to benefit from the new transparency.
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We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present – deja vu.
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The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.
425
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.
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The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
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Photography was a way for me to freeze time and to capture the moments that were happy and healthy. I saw a photo as a way to go back to a memory if I ever needed to.
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I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.
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We’ve definitely had our share of ups and downs as a group, and there were times we’ve faced some pretty big challenges, but we were able to get through these times, which allowed our bond to grow stronger.
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If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.
439
I wrote ‘Oath‘ for Cher Lloyd because there were really no best-friend anthems out there. Not only did she love it, she wanted me to rap on it, too!
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And I figured out that the reason I couldn’t get through the day as well as I can now is because I had too many things on my mind, on my plate, you know, for one person to have. So I started to eliminate some of the things that were too heavy to carry and unnecessary.
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Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.
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I was in New Zealand and met this girl. Her sister dared me to bungee jump, so I did! It was a spur-of-the-moment decision – I wanted to impress the girl, and it worked! We were in a relationship after that.
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I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me… but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.
446
The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.
447
The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.
448
I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.
449
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
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If I were to say, ‘God, why me?’ about the bad things, then I should have said, ‘God, why me?’ about the good things that happened in my life.
452
There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
453
Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate. The world wasn’t formed in a day, and neither were we. Set small goals and build upon them.
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It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.
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