O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Of riches it is not necessary to write the praise. Let it, however, be remembered that he who has money to spare has it always in his power to benefit others, and of such power a good man must always be desirous.”
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
“Of science and logic he chatters,
As fine and as fast as he can;
Though I am no judge of such matters,
I'm sure he's a talented man.”
“Of several bodies, all equally large and equally distant, that which is most brightly illuminated will appear to the eye nearest and largest.”
“Of several remedies, the physician should choose the least sensational.”
“Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave–and so speech isn’t itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.”
Source: Silence Once Begun
“Of so much moon were your hips to me,
of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,
of so much burning light like honey in the shade”
Source: 100 Love Sonnets
“Of some calamity we can have no relief but from God alone; and what would men do, in such a case if it were not for God?”
“Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.”
Source: Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
“Of strong importance to me is the defense of minority rights, not just racial minorities, but ideological and religious minorities.”
“Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highestquality toyourmomentsasthey pass,and simply for those moments'sake.”
“Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.”
Source: Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World
“Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York city area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks.
You didn't know that the cock was a thinking organ?
Well, by this time, you should know that it is.”
Source: Faggots
“Of the 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey in 1914, one million have been slaughtered, and the survivors only 130,000 remain in Turkey and the rest are refugees and exiles. Armenian property losses are valued at over 5,000,000,000 dollars are more than three fourths of the estimated wealth of the Armenian race.”
“Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.”
“Of the 22 industrialized nations of the world, we're dead last in per capita giving to poor people.”
“Of the 403,272 tank soldiers (including a small number of women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die. Even the most optimistic troops knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew—or those at least who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself—would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armored coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply “boiling up.” The tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable. “Have you burned yet?” was a question tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. “I’m sorry,” the young man replies. “I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.”
Source: Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
“Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.”
“Of the 50 largest companies in the United States, you are the only woman CEO. Why?”
“Of the 52 Confederate generals who had crossed the Potomac in the past three weeks, no less than 17 — barely under one third — had become casualties in the past three days. Five were killed outright or mortally wounded... When the lost was lengthened by 18 colonels either killed or captured, many of them officers of high promise, slated for early promotion, it was obvious that the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered a loss in leadership from which it might never recover. A British observer was of this opinion. He lauded the offensive prowess of Lee's soldiers, who had marched out as proudly as if on parade in their eagerness to come to grips with their opponents on the ridge across the way; "But they will never do it again," he predicted. And he told why. He had been with the army since Fredericksburg, ticking off the illustrious dead from Stonewall Jackson down, and now on the heels of Gettysburg he asked a rhetorical question of his Confederate friends: "Don't you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford." (pp. 577-578).”
Source: The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian
“Of the 55 refineries closed in America in the last 10 years, they were all closed for economic reasons, mostly oil company mergers. Not a single one was closed for environmental purposes or objections.”
“Of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. In one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity.”
“Of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty rate was among the horses. Compared with the Somme or an evening in the Blitz, the Valley of Death was a piece of cake.”
“Of the affairs of love ... my only advice is to be honest. That's your most powerful tool to unlock a heart or gain forgiveness.”
Source: The Inheritance Cycle Complete Collection: Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, Inheritance
“Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.”
“Of the beating kettles, basons, and other brazen vessels used by the ancients when the moone was eclipsed (which they did to drown the charms of witches, that the moon might not hear them, and so be drawne from her sphere as they suppos’d), I shall not need to speake, being a thing so generally knowne…”
Source: The Old Lore of the Moon: Lunar Folklore & Folk Wisdom
“Of the best rulers, The people only know that they exist; the next best they love and praise the next they fear; and the next they revile. When they do not command the people's faith, some will lose faith in them, and then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, the people all remark, We have done it ourselves.”
“Of the big four, the PGA is the most fair and the least fun. Basically, it's just the US Open set up by nice, rather than nasty, fellows.”
“Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”
“Of the Black Prince [his son] at Crécy, 1345: Let the boy win his spurs. [Old English] Also say to them, that they suffre hym this day to wynne his spurres, for if god be pleased, I woll this iourney be his, and the honoure therof.”
“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.”
Source: Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings
“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”
Source: Selected poetry and prose
“Of the bodies in the cosmos, some imitate mind and move in orbits; some imitate soul and move in a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water downward.”
“Of the book of books most wondrous is the tender book of love.”
“Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose.”
Source: Mendel's Principles of Heredity
“Of the cosmic Gods some make the world be, others animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does of different elements; the fourth class keep it when harmonized.”
“Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.”
Source: Henry D. Thoreau
“Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.”
Source: Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924
“Of the cultural causes of misogyny, rejection of or guilt about sex is the most obvious. It leads naturally to the degradation of woman as the sexual object and the projection onto her of lust and the desire to seduce, which a man must repress in himself. At the same time that he denigrated woman’s sexual function, the preoccupation with sex resulting from the attempt to repress desire is apt to make him see her exclusively as a sexual being, more lustful than man and not spiritual at all….Misogyny can also develop as a result of the idealization with which men have glorified women as mistresses, wives, and mothers. This has led to a natural reaction, a desire to tear down what has been raised unduly high.”
“Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse.”
“Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.”
Source: Mark Twain's notebook
“Of the Divine character of the Bible, I think, no man who deals honestly with his own mind and heart can entertain a reasonable doubt, For myself, I must say, that having for many years made the evidences of Christianity the subject of close study, the result has been a firm and increasing conviction of the authenticity and plenary inspiration of the Bible. It is indeed the Word of God.”
“Of the entire gamut of reforms proposed by Gorbachev, glasnost really did work and rapidly changed everything. Unlike everything else, to achieve it, you didn't have to do anything; you had only not to do anything. You hade to not prohibit, not censor, not dismiss journalists for articles they wrote. Stories began appearing in the press that made you wonder how they ever got published. It soon became clear that writing the truth was actually profitable: you were not kicked out of your job, no "administrative conclusions" were drawn, you became wildly popular, and the circulations of publications you worked for went through the roof. The ideological dam had begun to crack, and although the Soviet leaders tried desperately to shore it up, they couldn't. The news that a program had been removed from the national television channel's schedule provoked instant fury, as if these very protesters had not been living a year previously in a country where censorship was total...From 1987 onward the U.S.S.R. moved rapidly toward winning the world championship for free speech. The realization that you no longer went to prison for anything you said so delighted everyone that people tried to make up for the preceding seventy years lost to censorship.
In October 1987 the national channel began airing Vzglyad (Viewpoint), which came to mean everything to me....Young presenters, also unlike the standard officious old codgers, covered a wide variety of news stories and discussed them in the studio. From time to time this was interrupted by videos of bands like DDT, Alisa, Kino, and Nautilus Pompilius. Seeing rock musicians with their socially relevant and often anti-Soviet songs on national television was fantastic. This was no longer a crack in the dam of censorship, but more like seeing it under fire from heavy artillery....For four years, Vzglyad was unquestionably the most popular broadcast in the Soviet Union. Its journalists and presenters became superstars who determined the way television developed. Their subsequent fates have been strikingly different.
Vladislav Listyev, the mainstay of Vzglyad, was shot dead in the entrance to his apartment complex. Artyom Borovik, who had become one of the top investigative journalists, died in an airplane accident in 2000; my daughter went to a school named after him. Alexander Lyubimov, the Vzglyad journalist I most adored, now roams the state-run television and radio studios as a diligent Putinite. In 2007, when Putin's censorship was in full bloom, he invited me on his talk show on a radio station run by the state-owned gas company Gazprom. He was as smart as ever, had the same intonations I remembered so well from my childhood, but now was pushing the official line and had a clear understanding of what could be said and what was banned. I looked at him and the whole time felt such an urge to say, "For heaven's sake, Alexander, I became who I am thanks to you and your colleagues. For some reason, you betrayed all that."
After Vzglyad, Konstantin Ernst hosted Matador, a program about the movies, every broadcast of which I watched. He now heads Channel One of state television and is a major Putin propagandist. The most repulsive, deceitful reports, including the infamous lie about a little Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in front of his mother, aired on his watch...
It seems incredible to believe that most of these people, who were at the wellspring of free speech in Russia, did not just hold their tongues after giving in to the temptation of easy money, but brought the same energy and initiative of their early days to bear as active propagandists of the new regime, foaming at the mouth as they defended acts of injustice and corruption.”
Source: Patriot: A Memoir
“Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and "fashionable") the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified, the being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible.”
“Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.”
“Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.”
“Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.”
Source: Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
“Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved....this they say is the element and this is the principle of things.... yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principle is water.”
“Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.”
“Of the five House Calendars, the Private Calendar is the one to which all Private Bills are referred. Private Bills deal with specific individuals, corporations, institutions, and so forth, as distinguished from public bills which deal with classes only.”
“Of the five most important things in life, health is first, education or knowledge is second, and wealth is third. I forget the other two.”