P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Professor Khupe rubbed his hand along the sand dunes of her windswept form. The static charge made her skin feel like the surface of a cactus. He recoiled. How he wished he had gone into the priesthood when he had had the chance. Embracing celibacy was far easier than battling the consequences of shunning it.”
Source: The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption
“Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?'
'Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.'
'Sounds to me like a euphemism for "freaky cult." '
'Freaky, you say?'
'Hell yes!' the kid said, standing up. 'I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!'
Langdon scanned the class. 'Does that sound freaky to anyone else?'
'Yes!' they all chimed in.
Langdon feigned a sad sigh. 'Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult.'
Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. 'You're in a cult?'
Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.'
The class looked horrified.
Langdon shrugged. 'And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.'
The classroom remained silent.
Langdon winked. 'Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.”
Source: The Lost Symbol
“Professor Lyall, cursing his Alpha for departing so precipitously, balled up the piece of paper and, after minor consideration for the delicacy of the information it contained, ate it.”
Source: Blameless: Book 3 of The Parasol Protectorate
“Professor Manley begins his first day of Uglification class by explaining why villains must be ugly to succeed. Ugliness releases you from the surface - from the prison of vanity and youur own looks - and sets you free to embrace the soul within.”
Source: The Last Ever After
“Professor Moody!" said a shocked voice.
Professor McGonagall was coming down the marble staircase with her arms full of books.
"Hello, Professor McGonagall," said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.
"What - what are you doing?" said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret's progress through the air.
"Teaching," said Moody.
"Teach - Moody, is that a student?" shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.
"Yep," said Moody.
"No!" cried Professor McGonagall, running down the stairs and pulling out her wand; a moment later, with a loud snapping noise, Draco Malfoy had reappeared, lying in a heap on the floor with his sleek blond hair all over his now brilliantly pink face. He got to his feet, wincing.
"Moody, we never use transfiguration as a punishment!" said Professor McGonagall weakly. "Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?"
"He might have mentioned it, yeah," said Moody, scratching his chin unconcernedly.”
“Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.”
Source: America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
“Professor Pezhman Mosleh is a true artist whose work touched me deeply.”
“Professor Rex Curry ... has been researching the link between Hitler's National Socialism and Edward Bellamy's 'socialistic' form of 'nationalism.”
Source: From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind -- exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”
Source: Man and His Gods
“Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked.”
“Professor Stephen Hawking predicted that the Earth could become inhabitable by as soon as 2600. Let's do the math: the average life expectancy exceeds 72 years. We are, at least mathematically, just a few generations away from mass extinction. So finding practicable alternatives to an environmentally harmful industry like ours is not only desirable. It's mandatory, at this point”
“Professor Tillman. Most of us here are not scientists, so you may need to be a little less technical.’ This sort of thing is incredibly annoying. People can tell you the supposed characteristics of a Gemini or a Taurus and will spend five days watching a cricket match, but cannot find the interest or the time to learn the basics of what they, as humans, are made up of.”
Source: The Rosie Project: A Novel
“Professor Trelawney: "Everything went pitch-black and the next thing I knew I was being hurled headfirst out of the room!" Harry Potter: "And you didn’t see that coming?" Professor Trelawney: "No, as I say it was pitch — ” [Glares at Harry angrily]”
“Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.”
“Professor, when people say such things after impossibility smacks them in the face, we call it denial”
Source: Sprout of Disruption
“Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.”
“Professor, why couldn't we just Apparate directly into your old colleague's house?' 'Because it would be quite as rude as kicking down the front door,' said Dumbledore. 'Courtesy dictates that we offer fellow wizards the opportunity of denying us entry.”
Source: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Professor,” Harry gasped. “Your bird — I couldn’t do anything — he just caught fire —”
Source: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“Professors and students claim to be on a quest for truth while denying that it exists or that anyone could identify it if it did. Such is the nihilistic atmosphere in major universities around the world.”
“Professors are often blinded by their own theories.”
“Professors are typically in their own little worlds, doing their own thing and thinking that the laws do not apply to them.”
“Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.... I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.”
Source: Daughter of Earth
“Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.”
Source: The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel
“Professors in every branch of the sciences, prefer their own theories to truth: the reason is that their theories are private property, but truth is common stock.”
“Professors known as outstanding lecturers do two things; they use a simple plan and many examples.”
“Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.”
“Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.”
“Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.”
“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education”
“Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.”
“Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.”
Source: Leacock on Life
“Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.”
Source: Teaching To Transgress
“Professors should not be hired because they are Republicans, but they should not be excluded -- as they are now -- because they are Republicans. Universities should find a way to recruit scholars who happen to be Republicans until there is a reasonable balance, one that would reassure the public that the current discrimination against Republicans is ended. Universities should conduct inquiries as to how this state of affairs has come to pass and introduce procedural changes to make sure that there is no such political bias against Republicans and conservatives in the future.”
Source: Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America
“Professors simply can't discuss a thing. Habit compels them to deliver a lecture.”
“Professors typically spend their time in meetings about planning, policy, proposals, fund-raising, consulting, interviewing, traveling, and so forth, but spend relatively little time at their drawing boards. As a result, they lose touch with the substance of their rapidly developing subject. They lose the ability to design; they lose sight of what is essential; and they resign themselves to teach academically challenging puzzles.”
“Professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally alternate the classroom with the beach: authors will write better when, as Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved.”
Source: The Courage to Create
“Proficiency in art is a contract with your self and the empowerment of your self. Not all of us demand or even desire proficiency, but for those who do it's necessary to temper the influence of groups. And while some artists think history is bunk, the historical evidence is overwhelming: "In my isolation I grow stronger."”
“Proficiency in martial arts is the practice of keeping centered and skillfully responsive under the direst of circumstances: the threat of physical harm.”
Source: Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee
“Proficient typists can devote more time and attention to the substance of their work rather than to the logistics of translating it onto the screen. In sum, if typing in the 21st century is a necessity, then being able to type fast is a superpower accessible to everyone who is willing to put in the work.”
Source: Be More Productive: Save 30 Minutes a Day by Learning The Art of Typing
“Profile follower might be a pursuer.”
“Profile of a winning team - They play to win. They have a winning attitude. They keep improving. They make their teammates more successful.”
“Profiles aren't journalism.”
“Profiles mean nothing. You could say, 'I want this,' but then it's not out there.”
“Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.”
“Profit and morality are a hard combination to beat.”
“Profit at the expense of no one.”
“Profit by the little trials that come to you, for through them we make real progress.”
“Profit by your own mistakes and profit by the mistakes of others. The referees were calling ball handling violations like they were getting commissions.”
“Profit doesn't appear as the goal but as a side effect of pursuing motivating principles.”
“Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.”