A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“An American credit card is just as good in Europe as American gold used to be.”
“An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended.”
“An American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.”
“An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar) once said: "There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.”
Source: The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson, Volume 3
“An American “epidemic of loneliness,” it’s being called, in research papers, the press, even on an official U.S. government website. Two in five Americans are unhappy with the relationships they do have. One in five Americans feel lonely and socially isolated. Loneliness, these researchers warn, is as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; can lead to suicide, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias; messes with our immune and cardiovascular systems, and more. Loneliness, in other words, is killing us.
So every night, like a bedtime prayer, I open my apps and swipe.”
Source: Ladyparts
“An American Family Sampler is a book any reader will find insightful, thoroughly researched, and fun to read. Robert Frump, author, award winning journalist, business leader”
“An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! What a really helpful and improving way of devoting your time to building something that turns off culture. Next week, I'm instigating Burn a Book Week, to encourage even more conversation. I've come up with a fantastic little device which I'll call a box of matches.”
“An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.”
Source: The Chicago of Europe, and Other Tales of Foreign Travel
“An American Idol is someone that has all the qualities that America thinks is positive, attractive and alluring.”
“An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.”
“An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.”
Source: Selected Poems of Charles Olson
“An American is a guy, a rich guy with a family, a decent guy with a family with as many kids as he likes, doing what he wants, working with people that he likes, and enjoying himself to his very old age.”
“An American judo fighter was expelled from the Olympics after testing positive for marijuana. Officials became suspicious when he kept stopping the match and saying, 'What are we fighting for, man?'”
“An American leader would be derelict of duty if he did not seek to understand all his options in such unprecedented circumstances. Presidents Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt in the lead-up to World War II sought legal advice about the outer bounds of their power - even if they did not always use it. Our leaders should ask legal questions first, before setting policy or making decisions in a fog of uncertainty.”
“An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”
“An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.”
“An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.”
Source: On Literature, Cultures, and Religion
“An American Prayer (Divine Comedy, Sonnet)
The other day I was having a chat with God,
she was telling me about the prayers flooding
in from America, all claiming extreme religiousness:
let our wall stand bold and tall,
fighting off all indigenous impurities,
let us paint it pitch black,
so it's too hot to be climbed by the savages;
now let us deport every last trace of sense,
let us deport all who defy our holy faith -
let us ban all blacks, whites, muslims alike,
whoever talks the nonsense of tolerance.
Then the Holy Mother sighed in despair, and said,
"and to think they are doing all that in my name!"
So I paused for a moment, then I grinned -
why not grant their wishes, then flood the entire Eden!”
Source: Sonnets From The Mountaintop
“An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy country.”
“An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.”
“An American religion: Work, play, breathe, bathe, study, live, laugh, and love.”
Source: Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work
“An American should be able choose to work in a place where he is with his kind of people and not find that at the counters, desk or benches they will be forced to work, side by side, with all types of people of all races; that in the lunchrooms, rest rooms, recreation rooms, they will be compelled by law to mingle with persons and races which all their lives they have by free choice, avoided in social and business intercourse.”
“An American soldier, Saddam in his sights, has a picture of a naked, buxom woman on his dashboard, an obvious affront to Muslim sensibilities.”
“An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself.”
Source: More in Anger
“An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?” In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, "How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?”
Source: Man's Search for Meaning
“An American worker should not expect his pay to be cut because somebody comes to this country illegally and is willing to work for less than he or she should be paid”
“An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”
Source: The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
“An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.”
“An amicable divorce is like a ventilated condom; it just doesn't work.”
“An amino acid residue (other than glycine) has no symmetry elements. The general operation of conversion of one residue of a single chain into a second residue equivalent to the first is accordingly a rotation about an axis accompanied by translation along the axis. Hence the only configurations for a chain compatible with our postulate of equivalence of the residues are helical configurations.”
Source: Linus Pauling: Selected Scientific Papers
“An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings.”
“An ample arse helps you to be weighed down and be grounded.”
“An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.”
Source: Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul
“An amusing fact: as far as I can recall, when playing the Ruy Lopez I have not yet once in my life had to face the Marshall Attack!”
“An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.”
Source: Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking
“An anagram of Axl Rose is oral sex. Why do I know? Because when I'm not playing music I love solving erotic jumbles.”
“An analogy is like a thought with another thought's hat on”
“An analogy of a psychological masterpiece, piecing together the puzzle becoming mind master of theology. What matters the creed? We all came from the One True Living Deity, a billions upon billions of seeds sown from his likeness & imagery. Instead of philanthropy, brothers of brothers and sisters hate each other; the envy, lust and greed. Oppressional slavery against our fellow posterity.”
Source: The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey
“An anarchist does not want to rule others and does not want others to rule him. Nothing is so despicable as half-an-anarchist.”
“An anarchist government somehow creates an impression in the hearts of citizens that no one cares.”
“An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal.”
“An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.”
“An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice and so on).”
Source: Against Method
“An anarchist is not someone who favors chaos but someone who favors the total liberation of the world through the abolition of capitalism, government, and all other forms of oppressive authority, to be replaced by any number of other social arrangements, proven or utopian.”
Source: How Nonviolence Protects the State
“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”
Source: The Book of Ammon
“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation with the right of secession. The individual or the family or the small group as a unit instead of the State.”
Source: The Book of Ammon
“An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.”
Source: The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
“An anarchist society is not one free of conflict. It is a society in which the resolution of such conflicts is not monopolized by an elite.”
Source: A New World In Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation
“An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”
Source: The Murray Bookchin Reader