Ordinary People Quotes - Page 3

• The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.

  Charles de Gaulle

  Judging, People, Leader

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• If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

  Stephen Hawking

  People, Able, Principles

  Stephen W. Hawking (1990). “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes”, Bantam

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• This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

  Anne Lamott

  Ocean, Heart, Artist

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• I’ve never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it’s much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that’s probably just because it’s you. Ordinary people seem to make it through the day without so many catastrophes.

  Stephenie Meyer

  People, Ordinary, Alive

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• Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

  Jean Anouilh

  Lying, Hero, Race

  Jean Anouilh (1951). “Legend of lovers”

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• Ordinary people who have lots of good ideas want more than a suggestion box, and they need a union to represent that thinking.

  Frances O'Grady

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  "TUC leader Frances O'Grady: 'People want some hope for the future'". Interview with Hélène Mulholland, www.theguardian.com. September 5, 2012.

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• You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Real, People, Ordinary

  "Fright club" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. May 07, 2005.

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• until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.

  C. S. Lewis

  People, Ordinary, Way

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• To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Love, Life, Beautiful

  FaceBook post by Gabriel García Márquez from Mar 25, 2015

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• The challenge for Muslims in America is to respect the fears of ordinary people while resisting the exploitation of those fears by political parties, lobbies and sectors of the media. To meet this challenge, Muslims must reassess their own involvement, behavior and contributions in American society.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Party, Media, America

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• The Constitution was made for ordinary people.

  Pat Robertson

  People, Ordinary, Constitution

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• I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

  Steven Spielberg

  People, Ordinary, Preoccupation

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• By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

  Matt Taibbi

  Wall, Creating, People

  "The Rachel Maddow Show" with Rachel Maddow, www.msnbc.com. March 24, 2009.

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• If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Thinking, People, Ordinary

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• God's extraordinary work is most often done by ordinary people in the seeming obscurity of a home and family.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Home, People, Ordinary

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• We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that's what's extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There's nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I'll give you half an hour of drama.

  Ricky Gervais

  Real, Drama, Struggle

  "Ricky Gervais Has An Animated Post-'Office' Life". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. March 3, 2010.

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• Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

  Stanley Milgram

  Jobs, People, Ordinary

  "The Perils of Obedience," Harper's Magazine, 1974.

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• For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

  Orson Scott Card

  People, Giving, Events

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “Ender's Game Boxed Set I: Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon”, p.843, Tor Science Fiction

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• The city breathing, burning, living the life thy had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life - how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred's word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn't control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects - not the reason, the purpose.

  Diane Duane

  Hurt, Morning, Live Life

  "So You Want To Be a Wizard (Young Wizards, Book 1)". Book by Diane Duane, 1983.

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• What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

  Pete Townshend

  Order, People, Theatre

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• A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Dream, Real, People

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• Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

  Jodi Picoult

  Hero, Simple, Hands

  Jodi Picoult (2003). “Second Glance”, p.450, Simon and Schuster

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• Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Passion, People

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.119, Simon and Schuster

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• What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling . . . In most cases the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. "Ordinary" is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (p. 176)

  Studs Terkel

  Air, Talking, People

  "Touch and Go: A Memoir". Book By Studs Terkel, 2007.

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• To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Life, People, Trying

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