People famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.
-- Alan Alda -
I'm an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it's useful to use that anger.
-- Alan Alda -
I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.
-- Alan Arkin -
There's a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me. People want a relationship with you that they haven't earned.
-- Alan Arkin -
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I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did
-- Alan Arkin -
I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is.
-- Alan Arkin -
You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.
-- Alan Arkin -
There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.
-- Alan Ayckbourn -
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I definitely see the good in people. Certainly in my own life I strive to be somebody who is functional and well adjusted and can face conflict in a non-emotional and non-destructive way, and those are the people I try to surround myself with in my life. But as characters, they bore me.
-- Alan Ball -
In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don't really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it's horrifying. But that's just human nature.
-- Alan Ball -
Directing is physically exciting because there's a ticking clock, you're working with people, it's very social, it's very enjoyable.
-- Alan Ball -
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
-- Alan Bennett -
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Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?
-- Alan Bennett -
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
-- Alan Bennett -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
-- Alan Bennett -
Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
-- Alan Bennett -
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
-- Alan Bennett -
Until we have a legitimate labor market between Mexico and the United States, people will attempt to come here to work.
-- Alan Bersin -
During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
-- Alan Bradley -
When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.
-- Alan Brennert -
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It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.
-- Alan Brennert -
Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.
-- Alan Brennert -
The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.
-- Alan Bullock -
'Civilians' is a term I love. It's what Elizabeth Hurley used to describe people who weren't on TV.
-- Alan Carr -
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I believe the gay community is a good group of people but with groups like NAMBLA [a pedophile group] riding on their coattails.
-- Alan Chambers -
Truly creative people care a little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing. Their driving focus is the life force that surges in them now.
-- Alan Cohen -
The people who matter will recognize who you are.
-- Alan Cohen -
You can be helping many people, but if you are not helping yourself, you have missed the one person you were born to heal.
-- Alan Cohen -
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Keeping your commitment to your purpose does not depend on other people keeping theirs.
-- Alan Cohen -
People who do not need to please are irresistible because they radiate wholeness, a rare delicacy in a world of hungry hearts.
-- Alan Cohen -
Happy people do not demand a lot from the world because their happiness proceeds from a place deeper than the world can touch.
-- Alan Cohen -
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
-- Alan Cooper -
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Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.
-- Alan Coren -
Can anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.
-- Alan Coren -
I don't think there's any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done.
-- Alan Cranston -
Unless you have a sense of values that's shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values, the organization, whether a nation or corporation or citizen group, just doesn't work very well.
-- Alan Cranston -
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I dont think just scaring people is enough. That worked during the freeze days to a major extent, but we really didnt achieve that much even at that time. You have to have more, you have to give people hope and a vision of a better world.
-- Alan Cranston -
With Urban Secrets, I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.
-- Alan Cumming -
Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.
-- Alan Cumming -
Sometimes people get really sniffy about the films you choose if you've done more dramatic projects or you're classically trained.
-- Alan Cumming -
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When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.
-- Alan Cumming -
I don't feel I'm a compulsive person. I multitask. I'm really well-organised, and I have lots of people to help me.
-- Alan Cumming -
Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.
-- Alan Cumming -
I don't avoid anyone but I always think some people hate me.
-- Alan Cumming -
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I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories.
-- Alan Cumming -
I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out
-- Alan Cumming -
The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
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I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it; also realizing it. Most lawyers are very successful, and they think that because they're making money and people think well of them, they must be doing everything right.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
For most people, the question why be good - as distinguished from merely law abiding - is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.
-- Alan Dundes -
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.
-- Alan Furst -
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
-- Alan Furst -
Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
-- Alan Furst -
Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.
-- Alan Garner -
Like it or not the American people support the term 'background check,' they support the concept of it even though they know it won't work to keep guns out of the hands of criminals they figure 'well if criminals aren't supposed to have guns what's the big deal about a background check,'
-- Alan Gottlieb -
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Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties. That's really wrong. Many of the libertarians are physicists, and many of the Tea Party people don't bathe. There's really not much in common there!
-- Alan Grayson -
You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.
-- Alan Greenspan -
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
-- Alan Greenspan -
Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.
-- Alan Greenspan -
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Marshall is the coach's coach. No one is more of a listener, who learns from us (his students) from what we say or do not say. Taking from what he has heard, he molds for all of us a program to make us and our people better for having been in his presence.
-- Alan Hassenfeld -
I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will.
-- Alan Hirsch -
Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.
-- Alan Hirsch -
The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.
-- Alan Hirsch -
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If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.
-- Alan Hirsch -
Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people's perception of the gospel.
-- Alan Hirsch -
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
-- Alan Hollinghurst -
My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.
-- Alan Hovhaness -
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This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.
-- Alan Hovhaness -
Evolution is far more than a belief or an educated guess about how people came to be as they are. It is, in fact, the product of converging evidence from many, many different fields of science. Many, many thousands of studies that, in fact, have provided a theory, an organizing principal in fact, that describes how humans came to be.
-- Alan I. Leshner -
I've been a lot of places, and my wife, Denise, she likes a lot of the fancy restaurants. I'm more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel. Those are the kind of people who like the kind of music I'm making.
-- Alan Jackson -
I think if you retire from touring then people think you are retired.
-- Alan Jackson -
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I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.
-- Alan Jackson -
If anything good came out of 9/11, to me, was that people were so cynical about the world - all you hear about on the news is all the bad stuff everyday, but what was refreshing to me was after that, you saw how many good people there are out there. For every one bad one, there's a thousand good ones.
-- Alan Jackson -
Wembley way is beginning to blacked with people in terms of red and blue
-- Alan Jackson -
Did you weep for the children who lost their dear loved ones and pray for the ones who don't know? Did you rejoice for the people who walked from the rubble, and sob for the ones left below?
-- Alan Jackson -
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Reagan didn't put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.
-- Alan K. Simpson -
Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
-- Alan Kay -
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
-- Alan Kay -
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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
-- Alan Kay -
When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.
-- Alan Kay -
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
-- Alan Kay -
Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
-- Alan Kay -
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[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
-- Alan Kay -
Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen.
-- Alan Keith -
The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral incapacity of the American people.
-- Alan Keyes -
I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents.
-- Alan Keyes -
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You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.
-- Alan Keyes -
In its proper constitutional sense, the term [militia] means all the able-bodied people who can be trained and disciplined to act in the community’s defence when it’s attacked. Since it encompasses every able-bodied person, it does not refer to those—such as the police, the military, or even the National Guard—who formally compose the official defence forces of the nation. Every citizen able and willing to act in an emergency becomes a potential defender against attacks aimed at the general population.
-- Alan Keyes -
Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.
-- Alan Keyes -
Increasingly, I wonder if there are any outrages that would be sufficiently ominous in their effects upon liberty and unequivocal in their moral perversity to awaken the American people to the tyrannical spirit that envelopes the Clinton White House.
-- Alan Keyes -
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The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well.
-- Alan Keyes -
I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent the people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it.
-- Alan Keyes -
It seems only reasonable that the people have a right to know virtually everything about the personality they are buying each time they put their money through the box office
-- Alan Ladd -
I'm shy and can't for the life of me barge around and slap people on the back. I sit in a corner by myself and am tickled to death when someone comes over to talk to me
-- Alan Ladd -
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Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
-- Alan Lightman -
It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
-- Alan Lightman -
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
-- Alan Lightman -
When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
-- Alan Lightman -