Colossal Quotes - Page 4

• I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

  Alan Moore

  School, Opportunity, Thinking

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• Well, then, since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.

  Cassandra Clare

  Praying, Another Life, Wells

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.1151, Simon and Schuster

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• [On lions:] It has always seemed miraculous to me that these colossal animals can move noiselessly through the bush, and are thus able to surround one without warning.

  Joy Adamson

  Moving, Animal, Warning

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• The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

  Joan Aiken

  Children, Book, Impact

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• I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Believe, Medicine, Political

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• [Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Honesty, Believe, Character

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• We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

  Carl Sandburg

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• There should be a colossal mother going about the world to turn men over her lap and give them the slipper. They pine for it.

  Mary Catherwood

  Mother, Men, Giving

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• Vast, colossal destiny, which raises man to fame, though it may also grind him to powder!

  Friedrich Schiller

  Destiny, Men, May

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• The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them.... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.

  B. C. Forbes

  Photography, Moving, Thinking

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• Invest in low-turnover, passively managed index funds... and stay away from profit-driven investment management organizations... The mutual fund industry is a colossal failure... resulting from its systematic exploitation of individual investors... as funds extract enormous sums from investors in exchange for providing a shocking disservice... Excessive management fees take their toll, and manager profits dominate fiduciary responsibility.

  David F. Swensen

  Responsibility, Organization, Systematic

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• The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

  Albert J. Nock

  Exercise, Hands, Citizens

  "On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays". Book by Albert J. Nock, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and Londo, 1928.

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• The most fearful phenomenon of these midcentury years is not the atom bomb; atomic energy does have its constructive possibilities.... The most fearful event of these times is the colossal expansion of the government of the United States and the constant increase of executive power within the government.

  Wheeler McMillen

  Government, Years, America

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• The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Teacher, Three, Wonderful

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• Condoms should be marked in 3 sizes: jumbo, colossal and super colossal, so that men do not have to go in and ask for the small.

  Barbara Seaman

  Funny, Sex, Humor

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• This President has made, I regret to say, a colossal error of judgment. And judgment is what we look for in the president of the President of the United States of America.

  John F. Kerry

  Regret, America, Errors

  "Would a Kerry win increase risk of terror?". Debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry at the University of Miami, www.cnn.com. September 30, 2004.

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• England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists.

  William Crookes

  Food, Science, Discovery

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• Character is the colossal hope of human improvement within and without.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Character, Improvement, Humans

  Sri Chinmoy (1972). “Eternity's breath: aphorisms and essays”

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• What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

  Alan Hollinghurst

  Technique, Brilliant, Problem

  Alan Hollinghurst (2014). “The Line of Beauty: Picador Classic”, p.73, Pan Macmillan

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• We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion "letters the longest "word" yet discovered?"

  John Lennox

  God, Intelligent, Names

  John C. Lennox (2011). “God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?”, p.74, Lion Books

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• So commit! Commit yourself to pushing through the fear and becoming more than you are at the present moment. The you that could be is absolutely colossal.

  Susan Jeffers

  Pushing Through, Becoming, Moments

  Susan Jeffers (2014). “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway”, p.245, Random House

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• Education is the great American adventure, the world's most colossal democratic experiment.

  Mary McLeod Bethune

  Education, Learning, Adventure

  Mary McLeod Bethune, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Elaine M. Smith (2001). “Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World : Essays and Selected Documents”, p.108, Indiana University Press

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• Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Space, Sailing

  Mark Twain (2003). “Tales of Wonder”, p.223, U of Nebraska Press

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• At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

  Atul Gawande

  Caring, Medicine, Differences

  Atul Gawande (2010). “Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance”, p.10, Profile Books

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• From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Self, Mazes, Torches

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