I Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with I. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“In 5,000 years of recorded human history... neither in the east or in the west... has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history.
That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.”
“In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.”
“In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"”
“In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.”
“In 50 years, your grandchildren will be asking you where you were when CM Punk beat the Undertaker's streak!”
“In 500 years, English has changed a lot, and right now we're undergoing an extremely rapid rate of accelerated advancement in terms of technology, but I still have a hard time believing that we're going to stop speaking to each other. The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either. It's going to continue to create a cultural affect where people will be able to understand something beyond function that may otherwise be foreign to them.”
“In 56 A.D. [the apostle] Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive (1 Corinthians 15:6ff.). It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus.”
“In 6,000 years of storytelling, [people have] gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.”
“In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"
"For real?"
"What's your source material, nigger?"
"The Pew Research Center."
Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.
"I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.”
Source: The Sellout
“In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.”
“In 762, to symbolize and propel the new order, Al-Mansur decided to build the grand new capital of Baghdad as a massive round city. The caliph assembled an elite team of the empire’s top engineers, architects, and visionaries—notably including Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews, such as Mashallah Ibnul-Athari.”
Source: The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy
“In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.”
“In 812 days I will hold you to your promise to be mine. In most cases you are the stubborn one, but on this I refuse to negotiate, for nothing is more vital to my survival, you must understand. And when I say over and over how I want you to be mine, it is only because I am already completely yours.”
Source: The Traitor's Ruin
“In 88 poor countries for which we have data, in each and every one of the 88, the PPP for food shows that poor people can buy less food than you would expect from the PPP that the World Bank is using. The reason for this is obvious on reflection. It has to do with the fact that most foodstuffs are tradable commodities: basic foodstuffs, such as rice, flour and beans, can easily be conveyed across national borders and their prices will therefore roughly mirror the exchange rates among currencies.”
“In 8th grade I started doing theatre and I remember it was as though I had taken a trip to a foreign land that I had never seen before yet felt completely at home. I remember feeling a genuine wave of happiness and of feeling complete.”
“In 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important”
“In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.”
“In [chess], where the pieces have different and "bizarre" motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound”
Source: Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems
“In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.”
“In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.”
“In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.”
Source: A Mathematician's Apology
“In [India] and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of adoption. They are sold in the name of organ trade. They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything.”
“In [man's] mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell.”
Source: Lud-in-the-Mist
“In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man.”
Source: The Andrew Carnegie reader
“In [my] youth I was smacked around.”
“In [Philip] Howard's view, our reliance on law, lawyers, and lawsuits has turned Americans into fat, neurotic cowards who 'go through the day looking over their shoulder instead of where they want to go.'”
“In [Ralph] Ellison's case, it's more psychological than it is phenomenal, and it's conditioned by anger, animosity, and lack of desire to engage with the black body. There was always simultaneity that had nothing to do with visuality. You can be there and not be there at the same time and be fully visible all the time. That's what really struck me about Ellison .”
“In [Ronald] Reagan's view, the American Founders had anchored their experiment in Judeo-Christian beliefs; the Bolsheviks deliberately established an antithetical model. Those founders of communism divorced their "faith" from God.”
“In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.”
Source: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
“In [the soul] one part naturally rules, and the other is subject, and the virtue of the ruler we maintain to be different from that of the subject; the one being the virtue of the rational, and the other of the irrational part. Now, it is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature.”
Source: Politics
“In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.”
“In [Yogananda's] celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi, he offers a stunning account of the 'cosmic consciousness' reached on the upper levels of yogic practice, and numerous interesting perspectives on human nature from the yogic and Vedantic points of view.”
“In a 'wheat and tares' world, how unusually blessed faithful members are to have the precious and constant gift of the Holy Ghost with reminders of what is right and of the covenants we have made. 'For behold, ... the Holy Ghost ... will show unto you all things what ye should do.' (2 Ne. 32:5.) Whatever the decibels of decadence, these need not overwhelm the still, small voice! Some of the best sermons we will ever hear will be thus prompted from the pulpit of memory—to an audience of one!”
“In a 100-miler, anything can happen. Speed isn't your biggest thing, you need to learn how to mentally get through it. It is very mental.”
“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.”
Source: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying a.) something I already know, b.) something that's a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or c.) something I don't need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft.”
“In a 50 mile radius around Chicago one can see the red aura of pain, agony, terror, anger from all the animals being butchered there.”
“In a 5G wireless radiation world, it is reasonable to expect a rise in violence and mass shootings.”
“In a 91-part series of sob stories from the laid off and the disgruntled, The NY Times is in the midst of bemoaning 'the downsizing of America' - better known as 'the whining of America.' The cause of all the heartache, in the esteemed newspaper of record's view, appears to be heartless corporate chieftains - as well as capitalism itself. Americans are moving forward, despite shackles. The shackles I am referring to are not NAFTA, not corporations. They are, instead, the barriers imposed by our own government.”
“In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.”
“In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving -instead of actually getting up and leaving.”
“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.”
“In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.”
“In a Balenciaga you were the only woman in the room - no other woman existed.”
“In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority. . . . Cromwell and Robespierre . . . acted likewise.”
Source: Unpopular Essays
“In a ballet company, you're trying to create unison and uniform when you're in a cour de ballet.”
“In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.”
“In a band that works out well, everybody has a certain role to fulfill.”
“In a barren culture, one or two fragmentary story-themes play, like a broken record, broadcasting the same notes over and over again.”
“In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable.”
Source: Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science