A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A nuclear-power plant is infinitely safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food every year.”
“A nuclear-weapons armed Iran is not in anyone's human-rights interests. That is a direct threat to the lives and the livelihoods and the stability not only of the region but beyond.”
“A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!”
Source: The writings of a savage
“A nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place - like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”
“A Nullibist says God is nowhere (transcendent). A Holenmerist says God is everywhere and wholly in each part (immanent). Both views can be reconciled via a transcendent Fourier frequency Singularity, linked to the entire, immanent, Fourier spacetime domain. The frequency domain is “nowhere” in relation to spacetime, but is connected wholly to every part of spacetime. This amazing idea – ontological holography, to put it another way – was known to the ancients and medieval thinkers, but is completely avoided by modern scientists.”
Source: Holenmerism and Nullibism: The Two Faces of the Holographic Universe
“A number I'd love to know: the % of those now saying 'we have to vote Obama to stop an attack on Iran' who will support one if Obama does it.”
“A number is still very accurate, but its role is changed.
In the changed role this number enriches the silence.”
Source: Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
“A number of African countries came to us and said, we request that South Africa should not field a candidate, because so many other African countries wanted to, and, in any case, South Africa would continue to play a role in terms of building the African Union, and so on. And they actually said, please don't field a candidate, and we didn't. As I have said, it is not because we didn't have people who are competent to serve in these positions.”
“A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.”
“A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse - including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He's such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.”
“A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow.”
“A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.”
“A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.”
Source: Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
“A number of countries, including some who have loudly criticized the NSA, privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower, that our intelligence capabilities are critical to meeting these responsibilities, and that they themselves have relied on the information we obtain to protect their own people.”
“A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies...”
“A number of foreign policy experts distanced themselves from Donald Trump, not Michael Flynn.”
“A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”
Source: The Crying of Lot 49
“A number of girls of my acquaintance went to school to the nuns of the Congregational Nunnery, or Sisters of Charity, as they are sometimes called.”
Source: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: As Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal
“A number of Guru's feel that there is something wrong or sick about being gay. I think it really doesn't matter what your sexual preference is; what matters is the quality of your love.”
“A number of holistic and complementary medical doctors in the US, from general practitioners to psychiatrists, are using maca with a variety of patients. Both men and women report a significant boost in libido. And a number of men who have suffered from erectile dysfunction have improved, as a result of taking maca.”
Source: Hot Plants: Nature's Proven Sex Boosters for Men and Women
“A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.”
“A number of individuals tried to make my homosexuality a topic of debate. I admittedly found that rather upsetting.”
“A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S. forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another. The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways.”
“A number of laws that are said to protect citizens harkens back to "Jim Crow" era.”
Source: If History Is Our Guide: Commentary of Events that shaped 2011-2015
“A number of our scientists boast intelligence but lack wisdom. I find those to be the predictable ones.”
Source: Healology
“A number of people have written poems about Trump already, and I salute them. He is so beyond anything we could have imagined and yet, in another way, he has to be seen as a mirror of America. Our country wouldn't have elected him if he didn't reflect something in our country. In my view, it's a negative thing that's being reflected.”
“A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it's extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let's make it's easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.”
“A number of people still think of the United States as being overwhelmingly English, Protestant, and white. This erroneous idea influences their whole outlook.”
Source: Tomorrow Is Now: It Is Today That We Must Create the World of the Future
“A number of people walk up to me and say, "You're much taller than I thought."”
“A number of people who are interested in computers in this lifetime programmed computers in Atlantis.”
“A number of people who have supported me on the border fence in the U.S. have observed the fences in Israel and their effectiveness.”
“A number of plastic surgeons are claiming that looking at John Kerry now, as opposed to a few months ago, they believe he's had Botox shots. They claim a number of his worry lines have vanished. They haven't vanished, just Howard Dean is wearing them now.”
“A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.”
“A number of politicians, including those within your own party, believe Germans would be safer if the German military didn't insert itself into so many of the world's hot spots.”
“A number of rare or newly experienced foods have been claimed to be aphrodisiacs. At one time this quality was even ascribed to the tomato. Reflect on that when you are next preparing the family salad.”
“A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.”
“A number of revelators and UFO contactees have since mentioned to me that just before the appearance of an entity they were aware of a strange buzzing sound. Witnesses of unexplained aerial phenomenon have also referred to a buzzing or rushing sound shortly before the 'flying saucer' appeared over them. I am also reminded that great deal of poltergeist activity produces a preparatory 'signal' of a buzzing, rasping, or winding noise.”
“A number of small decisions, each appearing insignificant in the moment and made in isolation of one another, can result in a negative outcome.”
Source: The Leadership Contract: The Fine Print to Becoming a Great Leader
“A number of studies of adult psychopaths have shown that although they are able to make appropriate moral judgements (deciding that an action is wrong), they use different brain areas to make these decisions than typical adults or other incarcerated inmates who do not have psychopathy.”
Source: Psychopathy: A Very Short Introduction
“A number of studies of homeless youth in big cities put forth a startling statistic: Depending on the study, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of homeless youths identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
“A number of the major terrorist captures we have made, the terrorist operations designed for the United States that we have interrupted, were enabled by the terrorist tracking program.”
“A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.”
“A number of U.S. colleges are going to start having dorms for alcoholics. I believe those are called dorms.”
“A number of us had conversations with the Kerry campaign about what he was going to say about CAFE. What he told us was that he did not want to sacrifice jobs and that he wanted to work with the auto industry to achieve that goal.”
“A number of years ago, 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote this very influential book, The Road to Serfdom. He worried that the creation of the welfare state, a strong government helping individuals would lead to authoritarianism. We now know that he was wrong. If we look around the world, populism, authoritarianism is associated not with government doing too much, but doing too little.
By doing too little, it has given rise to discontent that threatens our democracy and threatens our ability to respond to the major challenges that we face.”
“A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.”
Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.
In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.
I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.
But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Source: Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science
“A number of years ago, people were saying normal relationship with Cuba, what a bad and silly idea. They're Communists, they are our enemy. Well guess what? Change has come.”
“A number system that ends undefined is not well defined, the mathematics”
“A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.”