I think if I hadn't been a writer, I'd have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn't going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!

Today's policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable.

Personally, I do not know whether humankind is alone in this vast universe. But I do know that we should cherish our existence on this precious speck of matter... the greatest gift that could be bestowed upon us. For all practical purposes, there is only one planet Earth.

For believers, both privilege and privation are a trial, and both demand responses: one demands service, and the other demands patience. The greatest privilege is to live well in flourishing lands; the greatest privation is to live in the midst of war, especially civil war.

I'm not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that's the greatest challenge that I have.

Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

I feel that my father's greatest legacy was the people he inspired to get involved in public service and their communities, to join the Peace Corps, to go into space. And really that generation transformed this country in civil rights, social justice, the economy and everything.

There is nothing so beautiful as the free forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities if it were not for my passion for art.

Historically, Macbeth is one of the greatest kings Scotland ever had. He was on the throne for 19 years, and he simply has this dreadful reputation because Shakespeare manipulated history for the benefit of James I, who was paying him to write the play to blacken Macbeth's name.

The thing that makes my generation The Greatest is our ability to hang out. We're spectacular at it. If you take somebody from my generation and sit them on a couch and bring them food and plumbing, they'll sit there and talk to you about anything you want until the day you die.

I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.

You get a lawyer whether you're in a military tribunal or whether you're in a federal court, number one. The attorney general decided that the court with the biggest - with the greatest venue, with the best jurisdiction was the New York court. That was the right decision to make.

The greatest luxury is not driving. I didn't own a car until I was 30, and that was a Rolls-Royce, so it was cheaper to insure a chauffeur. I never want to drive again. My mind is always on other things. I hate parking, and I'm very short-tempered and would get road rage, I'm sure.

Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.

The greatest gift of all time is that you can make creation infectious because people spend less time being negative... If you log all the time with negativity in the while world, I wonder how much better the world would be if people sat down and did something positive. It spirals.

Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

I enjoy fashion and taking the effort to present myself well, and I'm glad that a lot of people refer to me as a 'Hijabster'. I'm not the greatest fan of the term, but I think girls everywhere should be confident in their own skin and be inspired to look and feel good inside and out.

You travel the world and you talk to people about Jos Buttler, and they rave about this lad. I don't like massive comments, but he'd have to be up there with the three or four greatest white-ball players of all time. You're talking Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, MS Dhoni, Viv Richards.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.

Time and energy are finite. You only have so many hours in a day and so many days of your life. The solution to using your time wisely isn't about exerting more energy - eventually you'll run out of steam. The key to reaching your greatest potential is about working smarter, not harder.

To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.

Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.

Billie Jean King is one of the all-time tennis greats; she's one of the superstars. She's ready for the big one, but she doesn't stand a chance against me. Women's tennis is so far beneath men's tennis; that's what makes the contest with a 55-year-old man the greatest contest of all time.

About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

You can put the greatest seafood restaurant next to an average steak house in an urban area, and that steak house will do more business than the seafood place. If you go to the water, you can put an average seafood place next to the greatest steak house, and people are going to eat seafood.

To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.

When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.

I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

The young people I teach now know they are being sold down the river before we even start studying the trends and numbers. That's the toughest part of being a high school economics teacher... being a witness when our children realize that the greatest deficit of all is a deficit of leadership.

Wine to me is something that brings people together. Wine does promote conversation and promote civility, but it's also fascinating. It's the greatest subject to study. No matter how much you learn, every vintage is going to come at you with different factors that make you have to think again.

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.

When foreign assistance has a clear mission, buy-in from the aid-recipient country, and explicit metrics for implementation, the United States will be able to transition aid-recipient nations into strong trading partners. One of the greatest examples of this successful transition is South Korea.

I'm not saying Gustafsson isn't a champion. He's not the champion that I am. He's not a champion at all. I've won the belt seven times. He got tapped out by Phil Davis and lost to me fair and square. This guy gets so much praise. Having a close fight with me was the greatest thing he's ever done.

I can recall, as a young adult, running through the rain forest at the Forest Reserve, at times feeling a sense of fear when I felt I was in danger. In danger of confronting an ugly snake or a coral snake, which represented the greatest fear of someone in a rural area when you traverse the forest.

As marriage and the family institution constitute the foundation and chief cornerstone of civil society, it is of the greatest moment that the marriage-tie should never be dissolved save for the most urgent reason. I cannot assent, however, to the doctrine that it should never be dissolved at all.

The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. As a result, Obama is to the right of Richard Nixon on most issues. And there is we believe, certainly some space to exploit there. And we, VICE, aim to exploit it.

When you see a person, do you just concentrate on their looks? It's just a first impression. Then there's someone who doesn't catch your eye immediately, but you talk to them and they become the most beautiful thing in the world. The greatest actors aren't what you would call beautiful sex symbols.

The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.

George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

Animals are everything to me. I always say, 'Who rescued who?' with my horse Belle. She is my greatest teacher. She teaches me to be grounded, present, and in the moment, which I feel is key to happiness. My panic attacks become nonexistent when spending time with my animals, especially out in nature.

The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.

I began to realize that, in spite of great achievements in wealth and military prowess, the great powers of Europe have not yet succeeded in providing the greatest happiness of the vast majority of the people; and that the reformers in these European countries were working hard for a new social revolution.

In his first year in office, President Obama pulled us back from the brink of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and worked to lay a new foundation for economic growth. The president identified three key strategies to build that lasting prosperity: innovation, investment, and education.

I think my greatest victory was every time I walked out there, I gave it everything I had. I left everything out there. That's what I'm most proud of. I can't go win Wimbledon anymore, so if what I've done in the past is not good enough, let it go. Because I'm certainly not sitting around thinking about it.

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