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A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.”

“Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food”

“Anyone forced to accept a worldview which they entirely rejected was not part of a democracy but, rather, a tyranny. They were being held hostage by their ideological opponents. They were not free citizens. They inevitably saw the elected government as an enemy, not as the body sworn to represent and uphold their interests. When the one-nation democratic ideal – with the government serving the entire nation – was replaced by a two-nation democracy, whereby a government did not serve the nation but only its own supporters and own base, thus alienating those that didn’t support it and rendering them the enemy, it had ceased to be a democracy. Partisan government was a dictatorship by one part of the nation over the other part, not a reflection of democracy, and not any kind of consensual system. Everyone not represented by the government had the right to seek its overthrow. Such a government did not represent the general will of the people, the only means for it to be regarded as legitimate, but instead represented the particular will of one partisan group of the people, committed to an extremist ideology abhorrent to its opponents. To save America from dictatorship, to save democracy, AOC said that it was necessary to divide America into two houses, liberal and conservative, and each would then go its own way, free forever of the oppression of the other. She stressed over and over again that if the gap between liberals and conservatives were small, if it were easy to switch between the two positions, then democracy could function. However, once conservatives and liberals became fanatical ideological enemies, with virtually no one ever likely to swap sides, then democracy was unworkable.”

“Anyone has outside influences. They are the results of the cosmic roll of the dice: this person is born Aragon the Ranger, this person is born a prisoner in North Korea, this person is born Carlos the Dwarf. Some of these things are out of our control, but that doesn't mean that they can't be changed. A character, just like a person in real life, is a summation of her actions and feelings. Our actions and emotions are not performed against nothing, they do not arise from dust, we are in constant friction, and/or flow with our surroundings.”