M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“More often than not the "successful entrepreneurs" of the time were officials of the Communist Party or members of the Young Communist League, and this seemed to confirm the popular suspicion that there was corruption and that the source of their wealth was not so much enterprise and initiative as power and access to resources. On top of that, for the seventy years of its existence the Soviet Union had been inculcating contempt for wheeler-dealers and anyone else in pursuit of private profit. Someone working in commerce in those times could live reasonably well, but it was more prestigious to be a cosmonaut, in the military, or a professor. Then, suddenly cosmonauts were nobodies, just ordinary mortals who got rewarded for their pains with a three-room apartment and a black Volga car, and professors could barely make ends meet. At the same time, some obscure cooperative owner, and just about anyone selling something in the market-was a lord of the universe and had more money than any Hero of Labor ever received.
It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer. We often hear talk about the envy Russian or Soviet people felt toward the first entrepreneurs, and that is what made the late 1980s such a hateful time. I believe, however, it was all caused by the inequality of opportunities. If Gorbachev could have made it easy for everyone to become an entrepreneur, if millions of people had taken that up, rather than just tens of thousands of the smartest, or wiliest, or those who found themselves well positioned, then everything could have been different. Instead, the setting up of cooperatives, and later of the first businesses, was made monstrously complicated and was totally under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. If you wanted to start a business, you had to pay bribes or have contacts, or at least have the kind of charisma that could bring walls tumbling down. For long years this established the image of businesspeople as shifty, devious individuals who had got in on the act by less than legal means.
In the army, the police, and the KGB, resentment at this decline in the status of officers was particularly acute. Something was going to have to change.”
Source: Patriot: A Memoir
“More often than not, the thing you're trying to say has already been said, so don't waste precious time being original when she's still gonna kiss you.”
“More often than not, the wolves showed themselves in other ways—a track etched in the mud, a few scats here and there, the well-chewed, moss-covered bones of a Sitka blacktailed deer, and, most frequently and possibly most grand of all, a late-evening chorus of howls heard from the deck of our boat at a lonely anchorage. The sound echoed softly off the high granite walls of some slope or side hill, somewhere where the wolves hunted in the vast sea of verdant rain forest.”
Source: Following the Last Wild Wolves
“More often than not, though, no further mention was made about the fate of the prisoners. I wondered to myself what happened to these people? After months of digging, I learned the ugly truth, which is also addressed in this book.”
Source: Captives of the Southwest
“More often than not, universal categories have been clandestinely racialized. Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history, the very category human has not embraced black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.”
Source: Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
“More often than not, when people tel you to 'know your limits,' they're telling you to know your place.”
Source: Limitless: Leadership that Endures
“More often than not when we do not like our work, it's not necessarily because of the work itself. But more often because of the people we work with and more importantly because of the lack of leadership. It is amazing how inspired and motivated we can be when we like the people and when we feel like we show up to work because our leaders care about our wellbeing. It is kind of incredible actually.”
“More often than not, you will never be judged by your intentions because the world can't read minds and very few will know the heart of a person they have not given time to know personally.”
“More often than not, your best move is to keep quiet.”
Source: Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year
“More often than not, a hero’s most epic battle is the one you never see; it’s the battle that goes on within him or herself.”
“More often than not, Americans and Westerners overestimated the power and capability of the Soviet Union.”
“More often than not, anger is actually an indication of weakness rather than of strength.”
“More often than not, however, the person who flatly states 'Elves aren't like that!' is hard pressed to describe how they really look.... as if Tolkien has summoned archetypes from so deep in our minds that we can only recall them incompletely.”
“More often than not, I'm worried about, where shouldn't we have music? Because the tendency is just to put everything everywhere all the time in a lot of movies. You end up just numbing the audience when you do that and it's not the best way to tell a story.”
“More often than not, if you've got a good director and a good script you can't really go wrong.”
“More often than not, in order to find truth, a wise man must suffer the ravings of the insane. There is no undiscovered truth to be found in the minds of the reasonable and rational.”
“More often than not, it is what you are rather than what you say that will bring an unbeliever to Christ.
This, then, is the ultimate apologetic. For the ultimate apologetic is: your life.”
“More often than not, media coverage now mentions HIV-positive people in criminal contexts.”
“More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.”
Source: The Impostor
“More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.”
“More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.”
“More often than not, the belief that you are bad contributes to the "bad" behavior. Change and learning occur most readily when you (a) recognize that an error has occurred and (b) develop a strategy for correcting the problem. An attitude of self-love and relaxation facilitates this, whereas guilt often interferes.”
Source: Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
“More often than not, the easy decisions are the wrong decisions, and sometimes we feel like we're going backward when we're actually moving forward.”
“More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.”
“More often than not, the only thing between you and your dream is a rational excuse.”
Source: In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars
“More often than not, things and people are as they appear.”
“More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.”
“More often than not, what animals require our protection from is not hurricanes or fires, but abuse at the hands of other people.”
“More often than not, what you open, unwrap and install on your hard drive is not what you were told you were getting.”
“More often than not, when something looks like it's the absolute end, it is really the beginning.”
Source: Esther: A Woman of Strength and Dignity
“More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.”
“More often than not, you find players seeing something that they can help another player with or reinforce something the coaches are seeing. Veterans do that regularly with younger players.”
“More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.”
“More often than we care to admit, inconsequential decisions change our lives.”
Source: Rhett Butler's People
“More often than what you're suggesting, I find people are surprised that I have an urban side to me.”
“More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.”
“MORE OFTEN WE STRESS FOR THE THOUGHTS THAT DON’T EVEN MIND US”
“More often you see Argentine fighters doing big things on a major stage. To be associated with those guys is really an honor and it's great to see so many people from my culture do big things in the sport.”
“More oftentimes than not, you're automatically guilty before innocent.”
“More ominous the night, more spectacular the daybreak.”
Source: Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables
“MORE ON THIS TIDY STORY AS IT UNFOLDS
“Here are your sheets, Mom, warm from the dryer. I’ll make us some lunch while you fold.”
Elsie knew not to do everything for her mother because getting her mother active would help her blood circulation and help dispel the swelling in her feet. She dropped the armload of laundry on the ottoman beside her mother’s lounger.
“I can’t fold sheets alone. Help me with these.”
Of course. What was she thinking? Elsie turned to grasp a couple corners of her mother’s queen-sized fitted sheet. “I need to relearn how to fold these things, anyway.”
Mother and daughter pulled and halved, tucked one corner inside another, and brought the ends together like partners in a square dance. Suddenly, Gail growled, “Oh!” Fed up, she grabbed the sheet from Elsie and wadded the whole thing into a roll. “I don’t remember how to do these things! Just stuff them into the linen closet, will you?” She laughed.
“Okay. I was hoping you’d teach me how to do it.”
“If you don’t know by sixty, daughter, it’s too late! My mom was always so good with linens. You should’a seen her linen closet. It was like the linen closets at Macy’s, all lined up. Mom took pride in her housekeeping, but I just don’t care anymore.”
Elsie was noticing how she no longer cared about much of anything either. The proverbial rug had been pulled out from under her, and though she went through the motions of taking Gail’s vitals, dispensing her meds and massaging her feet, they often had little to say to one another.
“Mom, why do you think the Bible says so often to remember this or remember that?”
“Does it?” Gail gasped, “—talk about remembering?”
Source: The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch
“More or less constantly [he tease he]. [Adolf Hitler] would tell her, "Oh Evi, you're getting so fat I can't dare be seen with you. You really need to reduce." Eva [Braun] would flew into a panic until he would laugh and reassure her.”
“More or less Europe - that's the wrong alternative! What we need is less centralism.”
“More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild”
“More or less of these inner assets are still available within you to help you to not just live but to flourish.”
Source: When Roses are Crushed
“More or less," that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, the ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.”
Source: Working
“More or less the first thing that comes into my head is that some people are always looking for what they want to do in life and never finding it. I'm not one of those people. It has been very obvious to me from an early age who I am, and this has been tied up with creativity, and, specifically, with writing.”
“More organizations die of indigestion than starvation”
“More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.”
“More people are aware of the consequences of hatred. People are aware. Therefore more people are engaged in fighting ... racism and so forth.”