A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so she [Hillary Clinton] is saying we're not going to go back down that road, which is what the American people want. They don't want us putting more troops.”
“American tyranny has come gradually, like a slow rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes to our door. Until then, it is merely someone elses problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us.”
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.”
“American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.”
“American values are not just about America, but they speak to the human dignity, the God-given spark that resides in each and every person across the world.”
“American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.”
“American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.”
“American voters have to pay closer attention to politics if they want to avoid four years of whining about the outcome.”
“American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington.”
“American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. ...The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.”
“American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtightening
and chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.”
Source: Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
“American women are so fortunate. When I got married, all I wanted in the world was a dryer so I didn't have to hang up my diapers. And now women have paper diapers and all sorts of conveniences in the home. And it is the man and the technology that has made the home such a pleasant place for women to be.”
“American WOMEN are the best football players in the world. The need to declare our independence and our dominance resonated with the entire team.”
Source: Play Big: Conquer Your Fears and Make Your Dreams a Reality - Lessons from the First Woman to Coach in the NFL
“American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.”
“American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”
Source: The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Against an aristocracy of sex, 1866 to 1873
“American women often fall into the trap of, "Oh, these are my weekend clothes. These are my work clothes. This is what I wear at night." It's so old-fashioned. The French are not afraid of their luxury. Americans can be so puritanical and think, "That's my special-occasion bag." Whereas, for a French woman, it's her everyday bag.”
“American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that's not at all what fit means.”
“American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife - but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren't just housewives, they were community leaders.”
“American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.”
Source: The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge
“American workers are first rate.”
“American workers won't be able to compete fairly for jobs until companies have to pay higher wages in countries like China and India.”
“American working men are principals in the three-member team of capital, management, labor. Never have they regarded themselves as a servile class that could attain freedom only through destruction of the industrial economy.”
“American writer
1803-1882
Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.”
“American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867-1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world's foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, 'a supernova.' Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also highlighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifiable classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain.
One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies -- the part of the neuron that contains the chromosomes and the DNA -- decoding machinery -- are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mushroom's 'head'), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces. A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched structure that is a nerve cell's signal 'receiver') extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron's 'information-sending output cable') extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom's 'stalk').
Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neurons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus. (In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the antennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) -- and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration.
Kenyon's 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected. Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as fullgrown trees -- only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain's ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee's brain -- and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the information flow through the brain by learning and memory. It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon's, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information processing inside a brain.
Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplishments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved between institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship. Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for 'erratic and threatening behavior' toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later -- as Nick Strausfeld writes, 'unloved, forgotten, and alone.'
It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.”
Source: The Mind of a Bee
“American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.”
“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”
Source: Conversations with Don DeLillo
“American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.”
“American writers, at least those of us who are fortunate enough to support ourselves in the field, are by and large a lucky lot.”
“American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.”
Source: That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong with America - and How It Can Come Back
“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”
“American youth is looking for a reason to die.”
Source: Do it; scenarios of the revolution
“American's could be any more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel.”
“American's greatest deficit is no longer found in the federal budget. It is a moral deficit, and it may be found in a polluted and poisoned culture that has become the great enemy within.”
“American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot”
“American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.”
“Americanism consists in utterly believing in the principles of America.”
Source: Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson
“Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson.”
“Americanism is a question of principle, of idealism, of character. It is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent.”
Source: Theodore Roosevelt on Bravery: Lessons from the Most Courageous Leader of the Twentieth Century
“Americanism is a question of spirit, of conviction and purpose, not creed or birthplaces. The test of our worth is the service we render.”
“Americanism is not a matter of skin or color.”
“Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America.”
Source: The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt
“Americanization means the process of becoming an American. It means civic incorporation, becoming a part of the polity - becoming one of us. But that does not mean conformity. We are more than a melting pot, we are a kaleidoscope, where every turn of history refracts new light on the old promise.”
“Americanomics works, and I won't argue that is true.
But if the economy is getting better, getting better for who?
Well, if you ask me, I'm doing much worse than before,
With the welfare cuts, I don't eat no more.
So if I did wanna go out, I couldn't go nowhere,
Cause I ate every last one of them reindeer.
Rudolph first, I went down the list,
I got so hungry, I just couldn't resist.
I ate Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Dixon,
Fried them up and then started to mix them.
And before you knew it, they were all gone,
I wonder what y'all gonna do about my reindeer song!”
“Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.”
Source: Some of My Best Friends are Soldiers: A Kind of Novel
“Americans - not just starting thirty years ago but going back to the beginning, when we were rebelling against King George - we've always been of two minds about the government, which is why the framers wrote the Constitution the way they did.”
“Americans ... attach such a fantastic importance to their baths and plumbing and gadgets of all sorts. They talk as if people could hardly be human beings without all that; we in Europe are beginning to wonder if people can be human beings with it.”
Source: Singing Waters
“Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.”
“Americans ... have wrought a country that has after more than two centuries yet to evidence a single year during which it was not making war upon someone, somewhere, for some reason.”
“Americans ... want leaders who share their values, understand their needs, and respect their intelligence.”