A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A free ride is life's most difficult journey.”
“A free ride will leave you stranded.”
“A free society depends upon a high degree of mutual trust. The public will not give that trust to officials who are not seen to be impartially dedicated to the general public interest, nor will they give trust to those high in government who violate the rule of law they ask citizens to obey at the expense of self-interest, or to those who present government as the place where one feathers his own nest, [or] exchanges favors with friends and former associates.”
“A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it.”
“A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of
leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.”
Source: The Ordeal of Change
“A free society is one in which individuals are free to discover for themselves the available range of alternatives.”
“A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.”
Source: Meaning
“A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people.”
“A free society that allows each individual to seek his or her own selfish ends (without deliberately trying to harm anyone else) will produce a state in which everyone's interest is optimized without any individual knowing in advance what that state might be.”
“A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.”
“A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.”
“A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.”
“A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind - for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything - void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.”
“A free spirit is the master of its own universe.”
Source: The Backpack
“A free spirit lives a free life, not bound by rules but guided by wonder and in their wake, they inspire others to keep their inner child alive, fearless, and forever curious.”
“A free spirit lives a free life, not bound by rules but guided by wonder, and in their wake they inspire others to keep their inner child alive, fearless, forever curious.”
“A free spirit must be able to surmount anxiety time after time.”
“A free spirit myself, I secretly admired a freer one. To deny his right to chose his own path, was to deny myself that right, too.”
Source: Too Many Questions
“A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.”
“A free theologian works in communication with other theologians...He waits for them and asks them to wait for him. Our sadly lacking yet indispensable theological co-operation depends directly or indirectly on whether or not we are wiling to wait for one another, perhaps lamenting, yet smiling with tears in our eyes.”
“A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.”
“A free throw seems boring but then when you sort of dig into what's going on and the history and psychology and the social anthropology around the free throw - it's interesting.”
“A free will not subject to immutable laws would be "ein Unding", a non-thing. If being autonomous were being under laws imposed in what would have to be arbitrary, lawless acts, then autonomy would be a non-reality. If this is right, then there is no need for a concept of autonomy - anyway paradoxical and therefore empty - according to which being autonomous is being under laws one has freely chosen. For then there is no apparent conflict of being free and being under laws, which autonomy so conceived would resolve.”
Source: Self-Consciousness
“A free, virtuous, and enlightened people must know full well the great principles and causes upon which their happiness depends.”
“A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.”
“A free-loader is a confirmed guest. He is the man who is always willing to come to dinner.”
Source: Short Takes: Readers' Choice of the Best Columns of America's Favorite Newspaperman, Damon Runyon
“A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fire”
“A freedom or pleasure that rests on someone else's slavery or misery cannot finally satisfy the self because it is a limitation or narrowing of the self, an admission of impotence, an offense against generosity and justice. Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love.”
“A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”
Source: The Ethics of Ambiguity
“A freelance is one who gets paid by the word -- per piece or perhaps.”
“A freezing cold underground river. A dark cave lit by ghosts. A man too stupid to realize you loved him. This is what you want?"
"All of it. Especially the very stupid man.”
Source: Underworld's Daughter
“A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.”
Source: Peter Greenaway: Interviews
“A French friend brought over a load of Gainsbourg vinyl and I worked my way through it: by the time I got to L'Histoire De Melody Nelson (1969) I was thinking, 'How can this man have died before I got to know his music?' I was a convert.”
“A French lieutenant was asked by the commander of the French forces, “Jean, it seems to me that many people are only saying the things they think that I want to hear. Accordingly, what I am getting is not information, it is fucking bullshit!”
Source: A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume One
“A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France.”
Source: Democracy in America: The Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II
“A French player, Sylvain Marconnet, broke his tibia skiing in 2007 and missed his home World Cup. For me the risk of breaking something versus the reward was never worth it.”
“A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.”
Source: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
“A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.”
Source: Philosophical Investigations
“A French proverb says 'Wait until it is night before saying that it has been a fine day.' To tell it more precise, wait till the clock strikes the midnight!”
“A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.”
Source: The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
“A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.”
“A Frenchwoman, when double-crossed, will kill her rival; the Italian woman would rather kill her deceitful lover; the Englishwoman simply breaks off relations-but they all will console themselves with another man.”
“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
“A frequent change of role, and of the lighter sort - especially such as one does not like forcing one's self to use the very utmost of his ability in the performance of - is the training requisite for a mastery of the actor's art.”
Source: Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, Edwina Booth Grossmann, and Letters to Her and to His Friends
“A frequent exchange of text messages is not a relationship. It's not even a pen-pal.”
Source: Love Addict: Sex, Romance, and Other Dangerous Drugs
“A frequent intercourse and intimate connection between two persons make them so like, that not only their dispositions are moulded like each other, but their very face and tone of voice contract a certain analogy.”
“A frequent refrain of those defending the status quo is that the income tax system already heavily burdens the rich because the top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of all income taxes while 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes at all. This is partially true: Individuals with the most taxable income do pay the most income tax. However, this statistic is about people who have high incomes, typically from work; it tells us nothing about the tax liability of those with the most wealth. Studies have shown that there is only about a 50 percent overlap between America’s wealthiest people and those who earn the most income. Moreover, as the leaked tax returns of several of the wealthiest Americans reveal, the ability of wealth owners to avoid taxable income means that they are just as likely to be among the 40 percent of nonpayers as they are the top 1 percent of earners.”
Source: The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy
“A fresh approach is needed — an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour”
Source: Freedom: The End of the Human Condition
“A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that - every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new”
“A fresh mind keeps the body fresh.”