Among Quotes

“During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.
On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.”

— Alan Alda

“But let us laugh carelessly like other men.
Let us be timid even among fools.
Let us knot silence around our throats.
For they would surely kill us.”

— Glenway Wescott

“Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.”

— Frans G. Bengtsson

“The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.”

— C.L.R. James

“There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness.”

— Walter Lippmann

“Even the poorest among us deserves the dignity of equality.”

— The Prophet Of Life

“Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment "already"? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a "cristallisation," so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.”

— CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz

“Anger and violence in Gaza and among Gazans is completely predictable. In a situation like ours, the absence of violence and anger would be abnormal. All of of us feel angry at least occasionally.”

— Izzeldin Abuelaish

“Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare
he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die
when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.”

— Eve Babitz

“I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.”

— Emily Brontë

“Before leaving, I met them briefly. Thad and Ruben were among them. Then there was Annar, Orion, Stephan (pronounced Steh-fawn),”

— Kristen Ashley

“Korea is often called the "Land of the Morning Calm." It's a country where you notice the filth and the smog on your first trip and you can't imagine why you ever thought it was a good idea to visit. Then you meet the people and you walk among their culture and you get a sense there is something deeper beneath the surface, and before you know it, the smog doesn't matter and the filth is gone-and in its place there is incredible beauty. The sun rises first over Japan, and as Korea is waiting for the earth to spin, for streaks of light to brighten its eastern sky, in that quiet moment there is a calmness that makes Korea the most beautiful country in the world.”

— Tucker Elliot

“I don't want to wake up. I can't feel the cold of life. I can't feel fear in my dreams. When awake we are green and red bits glowing under a machine, lights turn off and on, and people of science convince themselves they know what's going on. Backs are patted, hand are shaken. Test, record, collect. They tell us what we already know. We are all dying, dying slow. When awake, there is a feeling of impending doom, and if you can't feel it, close your eyes, or open them further. When we're in a box underground, heaven is finally above us, but it's not in the sky. Heaven is the planet we lived on, and all of the angels are people. Here, in a dream, it's just me floating in the back of my mind, among parts we don't fully understand.”

— Craig Stone

“The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.”

— George Eliot

“Whatever was on your shopping list-linseed oil, two-inch masonry nails, coal scuttle, small can of Brasso metal polish-Mr. Morley had it. I am sure if you said to him, "I need 125 yards of razor wire, a ship's anchor, and a dominatrix outfit in a size eight," he would find them for you after rooting around for a few minutes among bird feeders and bags of bone meal. Mr.”

— Bill Bryson

“They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.”

— Lisa Unger

“I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.”

— Richard Elman

“I consider my voice to be a centrist moderate voice among the nine Democratic candidates.”

— Bob Graham

“Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists.”

— Serge Lang

“Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.”

— Sally Mann

“I'm among the first girls ever to play Little League baseball, and to my knowledge, the very first in western Illinois. It was 1976, and I was a nine-year-old tomboy whose older brothers had played.”

— Therese Fowler

“When you're cooking with food as alive as this
these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh
you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”

— Michael Pollan

“Before 9/11 there were weak procedures, willingness, and mechanisms for communicating among agencies for foreign intelligence and the FBI with its focus on law enforcement. The domestic-vs.-foreign barrier has been solved by the reforms after 9/11 that established the DNI.”

— Dennis C. Blair

“I chose to stylize 'Among Friends' and add a dark comedic element because I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a genre director. I have a pretty dark sense of humor and knew that in order to get distribution, I had to do something in the genre for my first time out.”

— Danielle Harris

“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”

— H.L. Mencken

“For among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible; which is one of those disgraceful things which a prince must guard against.”

— Niccolo Machiavelli

“This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“GYBE are among my, erm, two favourite Montreal bands, Arcade Fire being the other.”

— David Bowie

“There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.”

— Mao Zedong

“American and Israel share a special bond. Our relationship is unique among all nations. Like America, Israel is a strong democracy, a symbol of freedom, and an oasis of liberty, a home to the oppressed and persecuted.”

— William J. Clinton

“If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else.”

— Steven Pinker

“The highest development was in the Egyptian and Cabalistic systems, and it was blended with Christian thought in the schools of the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics ... Its studies were only kept alive during the Dark Ages among the Jews who were the chief exponents of its Cabalistic aspect ... and it is still alive today.”

— Dion Fortune

“Where you see immigration competition play out most clearly is among high school dropouts. I'd say there's clearly immigrant competition among the least-skilled workers, but natives are a shrinking share while immigrants are a growing share.”

— Jared Bernstein

“Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly-and not without melancholy-in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.”

— Anthony Powell

“Soldiers must possess integrity in order to build trust and confidence in themselves, our leadership, and the American public. Among the things I've learned during my career is that you must be honest with everyone about everything.”

— Glen E. Morrell

“What it means among other things is the more we learn about the nature of the universe, the nature of creation ... if we're not updating what we mean by God ... what we mean by the gospel, we're going to have outdated, misleading and actually trivial understandings of those.”

— Michael Dowd

“The United Nations, he told an audience at Harvard University, 'has not been able-nor can it be able-to shape a new world order which events so compellingly demand.' ... The new world order that will answer economic, military, and political problems, he said, 'urgently requires, I believe, that the United States take the leadership among all free peoples to make the underlying concepts and aspirations of national sovereignty truly meaningful through the federal approach.'”

— Nelson Rockefeller

“Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.”

— R.D. Laing

“Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence.”

— Horace Mann

“Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sectEqual laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony, and most favorable to the advancement of truth.”

— James Madison

“To work for better understanding among people, one does not have to be a former president sitting at a fancy conference room table. Peace can be made in the neighborhoods, the living rooms, the playing fields, and the classrooms of our country.”

— Jimmy Carter

“Learn obedience first. Among these Western nations, with such a high spirit of independence, the spirit of obedience is equally strong. We are all of us self-important, which never produces any work. Great enterprise, boundless courage, tremendous energy, and, above all, perfect obedience; these are the only traits that lead to individual and national regeneration. These traits are altogether lacking in us.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!”

— Novalis

“Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the
others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.”

— Thomas Sowell

“We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth.”

— Vladimir Putin

“If you have no share in the living Lord may God have mercy upon you! If you have no share in Christ's rising from the dead then you will not be raised up in the likeness of His glorified body. If you do not attain to that resurrection from among the dead then you must abide in death.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?”

— Wayne Dyer

“Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.”

— Daniel Kahneman

“Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character.”

— Marian Wright Edelman