S Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with S. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it's one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can't say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They've never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That's exactly what's cut out.”
“Suppose I was able to get to court, and the zombies followed me there, and they ate all the people’s brains who were in the court?’
‘This is Trenton,’ Lula said. ‘You might not notice.”
Source: Hardcore Twenty-Four
“Suppose I was to tell you that it's just beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on----in quest of the secret which is hidden over there----beyond the horizon?”
Source: Beyond the Horizon
“Suppose I were to give you a key ring [...] with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?'
[...]
'Well I'd try every darn one,' Rader tells Lyle.
[...]
'Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“Suppose it never stops?" she whispered.
"The gyptian man didn't say it'd do that. Just that there was going to be a flood."
"It feels as if it's going on forever."
"There isn't enough water in all the world to do that. Eventually it'll stop and the sun'll come out. Every flood stops in the end and goes down.”
“Suppose it's all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of one gland, too little of another — and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will come when we'll be horrified to think of the long centuries in which we've indulged in what you may call moral reprobation, to think how we've punished people for disease — which they can't help, poor devils. You don't hang a man for having tuberculosis.”
Source: The Murder at the Vicarage
“Suppose it’s your last day on earth. Have you done what all you wanted to do, you always dreamt of? If answer is NO, your time starts now.”
Source: Guru with Guitar
“Suppose it should turn out that no such person as Christ ever lived. What harm would that do justice or mercy? Wouldn't the tear of pity be as pure as now, and wouldn't justice, holding aloft her scales, from which she blows even the dust of prejudice, be as noble, as admirable as now? Is it not better to love justice and mercy than to love a name, and when you put a name above justice, above mercy, are you sure that you are benefiting your fellowmen?”
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
“Suppose it was demonstrated that one out of twenty alcoholics could learn to become a moderate social drinker. The experienced clinician would answer, 'Even if true, act as if it were false, for you will never identify that one in twenty, and in the attempt five in twenty will be ruined.' Investors should forsake the search for such tiny needles in huge haystacks.”
“Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard?”
“suppose Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.”
Source: Like a perhaps hand: Poems. Gedichte
“Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”
Source: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
“Suppose neutral angels were able to talk, Yahweh and Lucifer – God and Satan, to use their popular titles – into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their early kingdom?
Would God be satisfied the loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York Stakes, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell-fucks?
Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan Oscar Wilde?”
“Suppose no one asked a question.
What would the answer be?”
“Suppose now one of your hands hot, and the other cold, and that they are both at once put into the same vessel of water, in an intermediate state, will not the water seem cold to one hand, and warm to the other?”
Source: Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
“Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophesy doth to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration.”
“Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”
“Suppose people in government or parliament don’t see anything wrong happening in the country. If they don’t see any wrongdoing, we have the wrong people in government. The solution is not to force them to act on what we see because they will be in denial. The solution is to remove them from government because they will be a wall and obstruction, an obstacle blocking us from achieving what we want. They will be a barrier, a stumbling block. They will block our opportunities, success, development, growth, potential, and freedom. They will be working against us behind the scenes. They are the enables of these wrongdoings that are happening.”
“Suppose que tu rencontres un fou qui affirme qu'il est un poisson et que nous sommes tous des poissons. Vas-tu te disputer avec lui? Vas-tu te déshabiller devant lui pour lui montrer que tu n'as pas de nageoires? Vas-tu lui dire en face ce que tu penses? Eh bien, dis-moi!"
Son frère se taisait, et Édouard poursuivit : "Si tu ne lui disais que la vérité, que ce que tu penses vraiment de lui, ça voudrait dire que tu consens à avoir une discussion sérieuse avec un fou et que tu es toi-même fou. C'est exactement la même chose avec le monde qui nous entoure. Si tu t'obstinais à lui dire la vérité en face, ça voudrait dire que tu le prends au sérieux. Et prendre au sérieux quelque chose d'aussi peu sérieux, c'est perdre soi-même tout son sérieux.”
Source: Risibles amours
“Suppose several boys are moving along a particular road and one boy falls into a drain, his dress and his body, become dirty. Other people, passers-by, will laugh at him, but when the boy's father sees his boy in that condition, what is he to do? Will he laugh at his own son? No! What will he do?”
“Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.”
Source: The Green Knight
“Suppose some organism, let’s just say a chicken, hatched from an abandoned nest; there were no other eggs in that nest, so it couldn’t see its fellow chicken siblings, and since the nest was abandoned, the chicken couldn’t see its mother. There were no other chickens surrounding it. There were also no reflective surfaces in the area, so the chicken couldn’t see what it looked like and a few moments later, it became blind, so it could not look down at its feet or see its own feathers. Because of these factors, the chicken didn’t know that it was a chicken. Is it possible for the chicken to realize that it is a chicken? If so, what circumstances could lead the chicken to realize that it is a chicken, or is akin to any groups of chickens it may encounter?”
Source: The Reformation
“Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?”
“Suppose someone should offer me a plateful of crumbs after I had eaten a T-bone steak. I would say, "No, thank you. I am already satisfied." Christian, that is the secret - you can be so filled with the things of Christ, so enamored with the things of God that you do not have time for the sinful pleasures of the world.”
“Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.”
“Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: 'For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it's high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.' One would surely laugh a little at him: but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible. What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.”
Source: Fear and Trembling
“Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!”
Source: Zettel, 40th Anniversary Edition
“Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose you need a big full-figure woman like me to help straighten things out?" Lula”
Source: More Plums in One: Four to Score, High Five, and Hot Six
“Suppose something is written on a blackboard. If you omit some parts and add some parts, you can turn it into anything. That's how mind of Venus-affected people work. Their mind omits and adds things so that they see what they want to see and not what is really out there.”
“Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.”
“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”
Source: Heretics
“Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all.”
“SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. This is a good one, he says enthusiastically. I'm in it, and I think you should be, too.”
“Suppose that by revenge you might destroy one enemy; yet, by exercising the Christian's temper you might conquer three–your own lust, Satan's temptation, and your enemy's heart.”
“Suppose that climate change is not real and all we do is adopt green technologies, which our economy and our technology is perfectly capable of. Then all we've done is given our kids a cleaner world.”
“Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.”
“Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.”
Source: The Chomsky Reader
“Suppose That I'm Inevitable
Suppose that I'm inevitable
Even the veins of my right hand
Cross you from the drafts.
On my smooth nails
The breeze
Which is not from the sky
Is curving you
Either the veins of my right hand
Is running short
On my pulse.
Rolled along my fingers
Vanished
Not repeated forever
For the second.
I'm a half
Since the first.
The veins of my neck cross you all.
If the warmth of my ten fingers
Seized on your torn pieces of breath
All is over
With the dead-end alleys
all in oblivion.
(TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN INTO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)”
Source: Selected Poems of Rosa Jamali
“Suppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own "free and open society" is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions?”
“Suppose that insect wings developed primarily as thermoregulators and then were used for skimming and finally flying, evolving along the way. What would they be "for"? Or what is the skeleton "for"? For keeping one upright, protecting organs, storing calcium, making blood cells...?”
“Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing. That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran. Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it? I take it that the answer is obviously yes. Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem.
If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. 'We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.' Or, 'The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.'
Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t make internal sense. A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows. And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.”
“Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee, what can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just?”
Source: Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion
“Suppose that preventive care uncovered some condition that would require agonizing treatments or sacrifices on my part - disfiguring surgery, radiation, drastic lifestyle limitations. Maybe these measures would add years to my life, but it would be a painful and depleted life that they prolonged.”
Source: Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
“Suppose that the [career] transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.”
Source: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
“Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.”
“Suppose that the universe has a battery. If you take out the battery, universe becomes non existent. But then the battery will exist! Both the battery and the universe can’t be non-existent. When one is in existence, the other is in non-existence. This absolute combination is known by many names: Shiva-Shakti, Shunya-Srishti, Pure Feminine-Pure Masculine.”
“Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.”
Source: Language and Politics
“Suppose that there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment.”
“Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.”
“Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the natural unity... yet here there is this beautiful provision, that it is in thy power again to unite thyself. God has allowed this to no other part, after it has been separated and cut asunder, to come together again. ...he has distinguished man, for he has put it in his power not to be separated at all from the universal ...he has allowed him to be returned and to be united and to resume his place as a part.”