Browsing Topic Best Phrases Quotes

I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

These repetitive words and phrases are merely methods of convincing the subconscious mind.

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good.’ It is true that capitalism does — if that catch-phrase has any meaning — but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice

Everything is derivative. Everything is a remix, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants – a great phrase.

The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities – a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

In America, karma is best expressed in popular phrases like what goes around, comes around and what you sow, you will reap. Karma has also been referred to as having a boomerang effect where the thoughts and actions that you send out into the world turn around and come back at you… Jesus says, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Karma goes a step further and dictates that What you do unto others will come back to you. I think Jesus and the Hindus really had the same idea. Think about that the next time you want to say or do something nasty to someone else!

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.

Ah! the curse of slavery, as the common phrase goes, has fallen not merely on the black but perhaps at this moment still more upon the white, because it has warped his sense of truth and has degraded his moral nature. The position and the treatment of the blacks, however, really improve from year to year; while the whites do not seem to advance in enlightenment.

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes – it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

The people’s community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy…Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.

Stay far from timid only make moves when you’re heart’s in it, and live the phrase the sky’s the limit.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

I mean, think about [the phrase ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’] Isn’t it like saying, ‘I love left-handed people but hate that they’re left-handed.’ Is that really love? Or is that saying, ‘I’m willing to love you as I’d like you to be, not as you are’? Either God’s love is unconditional or it’s not.

It’s incredible how one song or even one little phrase or just a few notes, if you really concentrate on it, can be a kaleidoscope of possibility.

Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, …, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben (reverence for life).

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.

There’s nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase ‘I told you so.’

I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

If the women’s movement can be summed up in a single phrase, it is ‘the right to choose’.

Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time.

A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.

I mean, when you think about it, it’s ‘bombs bursting in air,’ ‘rocket’s red glare,’ it’s all kinds of – you know a lot of national anthems are that way, too – all kinds of military jargon, and the land – there’s only one phrase ‘the land of the free,’ which is kind of nice, and ‘the home of the brave?’ I don’t know….Are we the only ones who are brave on the planet? I mean, all the brave people live here I mean, it’s just stupid, I think. I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed every time I hear it.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don’t get it. I don’t get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I’m doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had.

To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I’ve done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.