A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“At a distance you only see my light - come closer and you'll see, you are made of the same light.”
Source: Servitude is Sanctitude
“At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.”
“At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"”
“At a family's most difficult time, I want to make sure at a minimum that they have the very basic of comforts: the ability to grieve their loss privately and the knowledge that their country is grateful for their loved one's sacrifice and service.”
“At a farewell dinner, the editors gave [S.R. Nathan] a porcelain bowl. For the day before he joined us, the PM had told him: "Nathan, I am giving you The Straits Times. It has 140 years of history. It's like a bowl of china. You break it, I can piece it together, but it will never be the same." I was struck by the way the PM made his point – he knew the value and place of The Straits Times in Singapore's past, present and future.”
Source: OB Markers: My Straits Times Story
“At a farewell party, his staff presented him with a gift: a beaten-up car seat—a nod to his Secret Service code name.”
Source: The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency
“At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.”
Source: Contact
“At a few minutes before four, Peeta turns to me again. "Your favorite colour . . . it's green?"
"That's right." Then I think of something to add. "And yours is orange."
"Orange?" He seems unconvinced.
"Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset," I say. "At least, that's what you told me once."
"Oh." He closes his eyes briefly, maybe trying to conjure up that sunset, then nods his head. "Thank you."
But more words tumble out. "You're a painter. You're a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea. And you always double-knot your shoelaces."
Then I dive into my tent before I do something stupid like cry.”
Source: Mockingjay
“At a finite distance in the future, a critical state of encounter will occur, an ultimate co-reflective Center. A focused conspiration will allure individual persons to identify with others in profound affinity. Because of thinking altogether, love will grow into Divinity.”
“At a flea market I always head for the junk jewelry table first.”
Source: Merman: an autobiography
“At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the checks.”
“At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.”
Source: Brain Droppings
“At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.”
“At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms.”
Source: The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
“At a fundamental level, we are still having to argue for the very ability to exist. The truth is, I still cannot go outside without being afraid for my safety. There are few spaces where I do not experience harassment for the way I look.”
Source: Beyond the Gender Binary
“At a fundamental level, as human beings, we are all the same; each one of us aspires to happiness and each one of us does not wish to suffer. This is why, whenever I have the opportunity, I try to draw people's attention to what as members of the human family we have in common and the deeply interconnected nature of our existence and welfare.”
“At a given instant everything the surgeon knows suddenly becomes important to the solution of the problem. You can't do it an hour later, or tomorrow. Nor can you go to the library and look it up.”
“At a given moment a child becomes interested in a piece of work, showing it by the expression of his face, by his intense attention, by his perseverance in the same exercise. That child has set foot upon the road leading to discipline.”
Source: The Montessori Reader
“At a glance, addiction, sex work, mad passion, and all forms of extreme behavior might look like pushing or trying to obliterate boundaries when, more honestly, they are a search for them. I want to find the endpoint, the place where my own powers end, so I can yield to something that I'm certain is bigger than me.”
“At a great pennyworth pause a while.”
Source: The Works of Benjamin Franklin Consisting of Essays, Humorous, Moral and Literary, with His Life, Written by Himself
“At a gut level, she knew this illness was one more ploy by her mother—one more ploy to keep Karen under her mother's thumb”
“At a label, you are confined to the team you have, but I did all my solo work myself, and that makes you more agile and able to go into weirder corners.”
“At a leadership level, there is need to become aware of the realities required to lead and deliver value to people and groups, some who might have values and beliefs that significantly differ from your own. The ability to objectively strike this balance will indicate your level of leadership maturity.”
Source: Making Success Deliberate
“At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs - Anaïs - Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."”
“At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."”
“At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.'
In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.”
Source: Hitch 22: A Memoir
“At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.”
“At a major label you can start to feel that you're working for them, and that any work you do, you're never going to see any benefit.”
“At a Male Allies Plenary Panel, a group of women engineers circulated hundreds of handmade bingo boards among attendees. Inside each square was a different indictment: Mentions his mother. Says “That would never happen in my company.” Wearables. Asserts another male executive’s heart is in the right place. Says feminist activism scares women away from tech. At the center of the board was a square that just said Pipeline. I had heard the pipeline argument, that there simply weren’t enough women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields to fill open roles. Having been privy to the hiring process, I found it incredibly suspect.
What’s the wearable thing, I asked an engineer sitting in my row. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving dismissively toward the stage, with its rainbow-lit scrim. “Smart bras. Tech jewelry. They’re the only kind of hardware these guys can imagine women caring about.” What would a smart bra even do? I wondered, touching the band of my dumb underwire.
The male allies, all trim, white executives, took their seats and began offering wisdom on how to manage workplace discrimination. “The best thing you can do is excel,” said a VP at the search-engine giant whose well-publicized hobby was stratosphere jumping. “Just push through whatever boundaries you see in front of you, and be great.”
Don’t get discouraged, another implored—just keep working hard. Throughout the theater, pencils scratched.
“Speak up, and be confident,” said a third. “Speak up, and be heard.”
Engineers tended to complexify things, the stratosphere jumper said—like pipelines.
A woman in the audience slapped her pencil down. “Bingo!” she called out.”
Source: Uncanny Valley
“At a meeting in her office in the late summer of 2002, months before the war in Iraq, prisoner abuse at Guantanamo is discussed. Condoleezza Rice brings in Donald Rumsfeld for a meeting, and they all agree they have to do something. Nothing gets done. Did everybody understand we were going to be as tough as we could be people we thought were Al Qaeda? Is there a better way to get information, get their trust, establish rapport, try to change their views? Nobody wants to think about that. It's just, let's beat them up. And that attitude was widespread throughout the Administration.”
“At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.”
“At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.”
“At a minimum, it is clear that human beings who claim a religious tradition that is rooted in compassion and/or respect for the natural world must adopt a plant-based diet.”
Source: Animals and World Religions
“At a minimum the majority of search dollars will flow to a social media model because people care most about what their peers think and the technology is there for that information to be quickly shared on products and services.”
“At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.”
“At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum.”
Source: Improvements in Education, as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: Containing Among Other Important Particulars, an Account of the Institution for the Education of One Thousand Poor Children, Borough Road Southwark; and of the New System of Education on which it is Conducted
“At a moment that comes rarely in the life of a country. It is a time when destiny is ours to hold.”
“At a moment when distortions of Islam are what feed most Americans, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin has done something both practical and inspiring. He persuades us that the imperiled environment is both common struggle and common ground for people who share, it turns out, more than simply God.”
“At a moment when we must face too much self-righteousness and narcissism on our path, it is a soothing relief for our soul if we can permeate through the shallowness around and penetrate the essence of matters, allowing us to still our mind.”
Source: Stilling our Mind
“At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off.”
“At a national political convention, you have hundreds of people who consider themselves at least as important as the Secretary of Commerce. If it's a Democratic convention, you also have dozens of A-list Hollywood and music celebrities. (If it's a Republican convention, you have Bo Derek.) Also you have swarms of lower-ranking Washington minions with titles like Deputy Assistant to the Associate Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff who are trying to move up the ladder to Deputy Associate to the Assistant Acting Deputy Assistant Understudy.”
Source: I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood
“At a night like this,
where it's just me and the yellow moon,
I feel complete.”
“At a party recently I was introduced to Meryl Streep, and it took me a second to get my head around it. You know, that I'm meeting these people now. I'm doing it.”
“At a party, the guests drink more than the host. The same can be said on the plane, the passengers should have fun and not the pilot. In this case, the pilot is the shepherd of the sheep. The keeper of the flocks.”
“At a party, I am the kind of girl who will wait until the end of the night before I really get going. I'm a little anti-social at first, but I'm not immune to dancing on tables either.”
“At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.”
Source: Against the Grain: (À rebours)
“At a personal level, as a Buddhist practitioner, I deliberately visualize and think about death in my daily practice. Death is not separated from our lives. Due to my research and thoughts about death, I have some guarantee and some conviction that it will be a positive experience.”
“At a place, I heard the river talking to the banks, “I have travelled so far, how far to go before I reach the ocean? Please guide.”
The banks were silent. But there was an answer in the silence, “From the origin to the end, you are a single unit, 0 River! Stop identifying yourself as water. You, the river, are already in touch with the ocean.”
“At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.”
“At a point in my life where achieving goals are not options but a necessity.
Where dreams are fulfilled by working hard.
Where mistakes I've made and challenges I've come across are a story to empower others.
Where the choices I currently make is for my best interest.
Where my circle has become smaller and includes only persons who can build me and I can do the same for them.
Where success is priority and life is worth living with God being my guide.”