A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A special treat has been prepared----ayu, a troutlike fish caught in the Nagara River from the Gifu area. It is served whole over a bed of rice, once a currency and now a sacred grain.
"Very fresh," the chef informs us with a proud smile. "Caught this morning."
"It's considered a delicacy," my father says as the chef leaves. I haven't managed a taste yet. I'm watching my father, observing how he'll eat the fish.
He brings the bowl to his face, then uses the ohashi to grasp the tiny sweetfish and take a bite, staring with the head. I blink. Oh, okay. That's how it's done. I pick up my ohashi and copy his moves.
My teeth sink into the fish. I wait for my gag reflex to kick in, but it doesn't. The skin is crunchy and salty, but gives way to a softer, sweet inside, tasting like watermelon. My saliva glands kick into overdrive. Just like that, I'm all in. If ayu is on the menu, I'll have two.”
Source: Tokyo Ever After
“A special validates you as a stand-up by documenting your material.”
“A special workplace has many ingredients. The feeling that you are part of a team, a sense of community, the knowledge that what you do has real purpose - all these things help to make work fun. But by far the most important factor is whether people are able to use their individual talents and skills to do something useful, significant, and worthwhile.”
Source: Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach To Fun on the Job
“A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.”
Source: His Master's Voice
“A specialist is someone who does everything else worse.”
“A specialist masters one branch. A generalist climbs the whole tree. Why? Generalists aren't hobbyists, they can master skillset after skillset, branch upon branch, and bring resources together where others remain siloed in the deep. Masters go both deep and wide.”
“A specialty among public relations consultants has evolved in recent decades called "risk communication." I don't much care for the term. It implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.”
Source: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
“A species capable enough to cause climate change, is also capable enough to cease climate change, but only if we realize our mistakes in time - and that time is now, because later will be too late.”
“A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones integrate or hybridise wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.”
“A species divided against itself will eventually fall.”
“A species equipped with vengeance and gratitude responses can support larger and more cooperative social groups because the payoff to cheaters is reduced by the costs they bear in making enemies.”
Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
“A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.”
“A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.”
Source: The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance
“A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area's biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.”
“A species of madness' had come upon her, [Dr Clark] claimed ... but these fears were greatly amplified by the fact that Victoria was approaching that time of life when Victorian women in general were believed to lose control of themselves: the menopause. ... Menopausal women, contemporary doctors hinted, would become sex maniacs.”
Source: Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
“A species to consider the rich soil to be poor than the refined Gold, Humans”
“A speck of ire can
blaze a fire; the fate of war can
be sealed with a dart,
a butterfly flapping its wings
may turn the tide miles apart!”
“A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.”
Source: William Butler Yeats
“A spectacle of light illuminates a room full of darkness.”
“A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.”
Source: Manifesto of the Communist Party
“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.”
Source: The Communist Manifesto
“A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.”
“A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the Party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?”
Source: The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings: & Selected Writings
“A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.”
Source: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
“A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.”
Source: Selected Letters of Edmund Burke
“A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.”
Source: The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed
“A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.”
Source: Baruch: My own story
“A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.”
Source: House of All Nations
“A speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener.”
“A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.”
“A speech is like an airplane engine. It may sound like hell but you've got to go on.”
“A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.”
Source: Today's Best Nonfiction
“A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.”
Source: Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
“A speech should not just be a sharing of information, but a sharing of yourself.”
“A speech that I heard Hugo Chavez give at a meeting in Caracas in July of 2010 comes to mind. He said something that seemed quite profound to me and which has stuck with me ever since: that the 20th Century was not "The American Century" at all as the US claims, but it was indeed the Century of Revolutions- for example, the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan Revolutions- and the US violently opposed every single one of these.
I would soon come to realize that the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting "Communism," and more to do with making the world safe corporate plunder.”
Source: The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
“A speech that reverbs with superb proverbs is a soothing herb.”
Source: Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1
“A speech without a specific purpose is like a journey without a destination.”
“A spell... this is real life, not some magical world - what kind of an alternate reality did I stumble into?”
Source: The Watchers: The Tomb
“A Spencer—now here is an intricate machine, a clockwork of a gun finely thought out, each piece doing many different parts of the job as the weapon is aimed and gotten ready to fire. This is a gun of a time when imagination sprang forward, when the brain was a storm of ideas, one leading to another, then more, and others beyond that. This is a machine of pieces in a complicated dance, made to work as one; a machine no stronger than its weakest part. It is a sum far more than the simple addition of stamped metal bits and honed edges.”
Source: American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms
“A sphere is made up of not one, but an infinite number of circles; women have diverse gifts, and to say that women's sphere is the family circle is a mathematical absurdity.”
“a spider and a fly
i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world
you will have to
show me said the spider
i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses
it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten
you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk
of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all
boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature
archy”
Source: Archy and Mehitabel
“A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.”
Source: Chocolat
“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
Source: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production
“A spider is proud when it has caught a fly; one man when he has caught a poor hare, and another when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another when he has taken wild boars, and another when he has taken bears, and another when he has taken Sarmatians. Are not these robbers, if you examine their opinions?”
“A spider is slow, but its web catches the fastest flies.”
“A spider lives inside my head Who weaves a strange and wondrous web Of silken threads and silver strings To catch all sorts of flying things, Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles And specks of dried-up tears, And dust of dreams that catch and cling For years and years and years...”
“A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order.”
“A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.”
“A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”
Source: The Shipping News: A Novel
“A spinning stash is much more complex than a knitting stash. It is like the first mother goddess. Everything comes from it, and nothing happens without it. You can't have yarn without the fiber.
(From the essay 'Spinning Stash')”