Brief Quotes - page 18

Only the misapprehension that [Paglia] can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was 'an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality.' On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can't even be convincing when they masturbate. (Clive James)
Never thank anybody for anything, except a drink of water in the desert - and then make it brief. View quote
Gene Fowler
I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the world's shortest speech. He said I will be so brief I have already finished, and he sat down. View quote
Gene Fowler
If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation and distribution of our riches, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity. View quote
William Stanley Jevons
Despairingly, sometimes, I seek the comfort of a benign god, Shaarilla. My mind goes out, lying awake at night, searching through black barrenness for something-anything-which will take me to it, warm me, protect me, tell me that there is order in the chaotic tumble of the universe; that it is consistent, this precision of the planets, not simply a brief, bright spark of sanity in an eternity of malevolent anarchy. View quote
Michael Moorcock
We humans are hard to deal with. We are a loud, complex and demanding bunch. Often, we are best dealt with from a safe distance and for only brief periods of time. This could be why a lot of marriages fail. View quote
Henry Rollins
We frequently fall into error and folly, Dr. Johnson tells us, "not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered.” To compress, therefore, the great and obvious rules of life into brief sentences which are not easily forgotten is, as he said, to confer a real benefit upon us. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy. View quote
Lee Child
Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale. View quote
Bertrand Russell
I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me. View quote
Marcus Brigstocke
We may be saddled with Bush and Blair, but you've got Prince Charles (a big friend of the Islamic world, probably because of its large number of feudal kingdoms and hardline attitude to uppity women), the Catholic church (taking a brief break from buggering babies to condemn any western attack as "morally unacceptable") and posturing pansies such as Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow and Damon Albarn. (Julie Burchill)
I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to. View quote
Rutherford B. Hayes
The accomplishments of the colored people in the United States, in the brief historic period since they were brought here from the restrictions of their native continent, can not but make us realize that there is something essential in our civilization which gives it a special power. View quote
Calvin Coolidge
It is a truism, of course, but it is none the less a fact which we must never forget, that this continent and this American community have been blessed with an unparalleled capacity for assimilating peoples of varying races and nations. The continuing migration which in three centuries has established here this nation of more than a hundred million, has been the greatest that history records as taking place in any such brief period. View quote
Calvin Coolidge
We're drinking my friend, To the end of a brief episode, Make it one for my baby, And one more for the road. View quote
Johnny Mercer
O brief, bright smile of summer! O days divine and dear The voices of winter's sorrow Already we can hear. And we know that the frosts will find us, And the smiling skies grow rude, While we look in the face of Beauty, And worship her every mood. View quote
Celia Thaxter
Most men desire to leave some work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief generation. View quote
Albert Pike
I like it when interviews are brief. Are we done yet? View quote
Robert De Niro
Posterity, until now, has been truly inequitable regarding Godbout. It is true, he was responsible [...] of renunciations, if you will, renunciations that this absolutely infernal pressure of wartime made probably inevitable. But it is quite unjust that people forgot that these few years of the Godbout government were also punctuated by three crucial decisions that almost constitute the act of birth of contemporary Quebec. In a few brief years, in only one government mandate, the creation of Hydro-Quebec, the establishment of obligatory instruction and [...] the women's vote. View quote
Adélard Godbout
I just have this fear that I'll get on stage and there'll be that brief moment of adrenalin and I'll forget my line. View quote
Daniel Radcliffe
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost. (William Butler Yeats)
I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Froude informs the Scottish youth That parsons do not care for truth. The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies. What cause for judgements so malign? A brief reflexion solves the mystery – Froude believes Kingsley a divine, And Kingsley goes to Froude for History. View quote
William Stubbs
I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled. View quote
Paullina Simons
I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2. It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds. View quote
Terry Pratchett