B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”
Source: Dialectical and Historical Materialism
“But having had your bright, fresh, original idea, the really hard part is turning it into a successful product. That's what takes all the sweat.”
“But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.”
“But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to? It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“But having people meet my family was a secret fear. It would be like taking someone to a dark room to show them my anal fissures, and you can't just go introducing everybody to your anal fissures. Only special people get to see such as that.”
Source: The World's Largest Man
“But having said that, regardless to what reviews come out whatever, I like love the movie. I think it's great, and so people can think what they think about it, but I'm very happy with what we did. I'm really proud of whatever all the actors what we all kind of accomplished and so regardless of how well it does or whatever I'm very excited about it and I think we set out to do the thing and accomplished what we wanted to do. Our goal was met, so yeah.”
“But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.”
“But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.”
“But having set myself these goals, I had to work really hard to achieve them.”
“But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds in the world—that’s what got you noticed. Being willing to stand up to the pressure of an opinionated, impatient engineer who put his feet up on the desk and waited while you did the work, who wanted his numbers done right and done yesterday, to spot the bug in his logic and tell him in no uncertain terms that he was the one who was wrong—that was a rarer quality.”
Source: Hidden Figures
“But Hazael only said, "I brought you a present." Liraz took the flower, looked at it, and then a Hazael, expressionless. And then she ate it. She chewed the flower and swallowed it. "Hmm," said Hazael. "Not the usual response." "Oh, do you give flowers often?" "Yes," he said. He probably did. Hazael had a way of enjoying life in spite of the many restrictions they lived under, being soldiers, and worse, being Misbegotten. "I hope it wasn't poisonous," he said lightly. Liraz just shrugged. "There are worse ways to die.”
Source: The Complete Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy
“But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.”
“But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“But he [Franklin Roosevelt] specifically prohibits any black participation from the Deep South, something which just infuriates people who'd been his supporters and who'd believed in him and resides that he is just shockingly abandoned the right of the people to rule. It's a pretty horrible story in that respect.”
“But he alone having reached our deep corruption, he alone having taken upon himself our labors, he alone having suffered the punishments due for our impieties, having recovered us who were not half dead merely, but were already in tombs and sepulchers, and altogether foul and offensive, saves us, both anciently and now, by his beneficent zeal, beyond the expectation of any one, even of ourselves, and imparts liberally of the Father's benefits-he who is the giver of life and light, our great Physician and King and Lord, the Christ of God.”
“But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.”
Source: The Master
“But he also knew this centurion, this man of honour, would change her…by giving her love…and love was the most powerful force in the universe.”
Source: Longinus The Vampire: Redemption
“But he also wants that feeling he had earlier, that feeling of being seen for who he is, and of being liked anyway.”
Source: You Should Be So Lucky
“But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.”
“But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined temple,
he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted
room.”
Source: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street: Followed by The Transcendentalist
“But he bent over the book again. In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it.”
Source: Misery
“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,
Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away.”
Source: Stories of Red Hanrahan
“But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”
Source: Youth
“But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing . . .”
Source: The House of Mirth
“But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin deep, as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.”
Source: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
“But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.”
“But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition
“But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.”
Source: Strange Affair
“But he couldn't think of it that way. Evie and Samantha weren't dead. They were just somewhere else. Somewhere he couldn't go. What was the difference between that and death?”
Source: The Night Burns Bright
“But he couldn't lie if you paid him and he'd starve before he stole.”
Source: Kipling and the Sea: Voyages and Discoveries from North Atlantic to South Pacific
“But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“But he'd realized too, at the same time, that his capacity for jealousy was pretty nearly boundless.”
Source: The Daughters of Cain
“But he did care; more than anything in the world, Fred Rogers cared...Fred never accepted the advice that pretending not to care would alleviate his pain and loneliness.”
Source: The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers
“But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.”
Source: The Absolute Sandman
“But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?”
Source: J
“But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery.”
“But he didn't need to seek visual confirmation of what he'd just heard to know she had. And the truth was, he couldn't blame her. He'd not have let her die, either. He'd have moved mountains. He'd have battled God or Devil for his wife's life. She'd betrayed him. He smiled faintly.”
Source: Spell of the Highlander
“But he does look stupid.' Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.”
Source: Breakfast at Tiffany's
“but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.”
Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems
“But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.”
“But he doubted the dead could think or feel anything. In his opinion, that was ones of the great things about dying.”
“But he drank a lot. When love dies, he told me, there are no survivors.”
“But, he duly ate the peanut and whoosh!”
Source: Peanut the Hamster
“But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. Also, I told him, what they want is something that looks new and completely original but is actually the same old story we've all known and loved since we were kids. Exactly, he said.”
“But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, thought, that he wasn't stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable.”
“But he found himself wondering what it might be like to fill that role for Hallie. In another life, obviously. A full-time giver of Hallie smiles.”
Source: Secretly Yours
“But he found that a traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.”
Source: Frankenstein
“But he gave no greater gift than the one he offered me shortly before he died, and it was a gift that answers for all time the question of whether it is rational or appropriate to strive for “ambitious” therapy in those who are terminally ill. When I visited him in the hospital he was so weak he could barely move, but he raised his head, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.”
Source: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
“But he goes all quiet. His ghost eyes roll / up in his head, white-on-white-on-white, / and he runs his shaking hands over his scars, / looks up like he’s going to wish on a / star.”
Source: The 2017 Rhysling Anthology: The best science fiction, fantasy & horror poetry of 2016 selected by the Science Fiction Poetry Association
“But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.
He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda.”
Source: From Here to Eternity