Phrases Quotes

• Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

  Ronald Reagan

  Freedom, Military, Moving

  Remarks to state chairs of National White House Conference on Small Business, 15 Aug. 1986

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• You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

  Charles A. Beard

  Life, Father, Struggle

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• But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

  George Eliot

  Philosophy, Mean, Experience

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.683, Oxford Paperbacks

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• You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of our society now, these phrases, introvert and extrovert, where it actually came from.

  Michael Fassbender

  Teacher, Drama, School

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. March 8, 2011.

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• Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

  James Bryant Conant

  Tyrants, Political, Magic

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• Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.

  Alex Trebek

  Answers, Form, Please

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• Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

  Gilbert Highet

  Intimate Conversation, Dancing, Needs

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• The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

  Stephen Colbert

  Grief, Mean, Thinking

  Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.playboy.com. October 16, 2012.

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• Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Inspirational, Sad, Regret

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Cat's Cradle: A Novel”, p.279, Dial Press

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• I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

  John Green

  Love, Dream, Lying

  "Looking for Alaska". Book by John Green, 2005.

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• I want to go to there.

  Tina Fey

  Funny, Desire, Want

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• Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?

  Louis XIV

  Death, Kings, Thinking

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• Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

  Anne McCaffrey

  Writing, Vocabulary, Style

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• I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lonely, Heart, Moon

  Virginia Woolf (1976). “The Waves”, Chatto & Windus

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• 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.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Government, Practice, May

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2007). “The Federalist Papers”, p.534, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.

  Plutarch

  Writing, Character, Battle

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• A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

  Isaac Babel

  Lying, Hands, Secret

  "Guy de Maupassant" (1924) (translation byWalter Morison)

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• The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Intelligence, Becoming

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• All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

  Clive James

  Light, Turns, Can Do

  Clive James (2009). “May Week Was In June”, p.204, Pan Macmillan

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• Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

  Robert Creeley

  Writing, Play, Important

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• If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose . . . the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before. . . . Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

  Ayn Rand

  Names, People, Firsts

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.38, Penguin

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• People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so; they are called dwellers sur la branche.

  E. V. Lucas

  Roots, People, Guests

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• The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.

  Francis Galton

  Men, Two, Personality

  Francis Galton (1874). “English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture”, p.12

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• Great communication depends on two simple skills-context, which attunes a leader to the same frequency as his or her audience, and delivery, which allows a leader to phrase messages in a language the audience can understand.

  John C. Maxwell

  Leadership, Communication, Simple

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• I hope the guy who came up with the phrase 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll' rots in hell, I'd like to change it so it makes more sense: 'sex death and rock 'n' roll'

  Gene Simmons

  Sex, Rocks, Guy

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