c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.
— Thomas E. Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the Politics of Extremism
Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries.
— Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle
France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine.
— William Arthur Sirmon, That's War
I don't know what's worse by number in America, the vacant houses standing, or the homeless people falling into them.
— Anthony Liccione
When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was. Here we lived with no map. We became invisible, the people who swam in between other people's lives, bussing dishes, delivering groceries. What was wrong?We didn't know. The most important thing, Abba said, was not to stick out. Don't let them see you. But I think it hurt him, to hide so much.
— Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions
This whole country's stolen.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled the trigger.
— Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart
Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart.
— Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions
It is not the self respect and pride that you take with you, but the heritage you leave behind to your children that matters. A strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations. Those blessed with a patriotic genetic legacy should run to the top of the mountain and roar with all fervency, “If they can over come, so will I!” When you know the ghosts that stand in support of you, you can begin to see life as they did—a life of joy, possibilities and freedom.
— Shannon L. Alder
erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.
— Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
Dickinson left the rostrum to applause, loud shouts of approval. Franklin was surprised, looked toward Adams, who returned the look, shook his head. The chamber was dismissed, and Franklin pushed himself slowly up out of the chair. He began to struggle a bit, pain in both knees, the stiffness holding him tightly, felt a hand under his arm.“Allow me, sir.” Adams helped him up, commenting as he did so, “We have a substantial lack of backbone in this room, I’m afraid.”Franklin looked past him, saw Dickinson standing close behind, staring angrily at Adams, reacting to his words.“Mr. Dickinson, a fine speech, sir,” said Franklin.Adams seemed suddenly embarrassed, did not look behind him, nodded quickly to Franklin, moved away toward the entrance. Franklin saw Dickinson following Adams, began to follow himself. My God, let’s not have a duel. He slipped through the crowd of delegates, making polite acknowledgments left and right, still keeping his eye on Dickinson. The man was gone now, following Adams out of the hall. Franklin reached the door, could see them both, heard the taller man call out, saw Adams turn, a look of surprise. Franklin moved closer, heard Adams say, “My apologies for my indiscreet remark, sir. However, I am certain you are aware of my sentiments.” Dickinson seemed to explode in Adams’ face. “What is the reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation? Why do you hold so tightly to this determined opposition to petitioning the king?” Franklin heard other men gathering behind him, filling the entranceway, Dickinson’s volume drawing them. He could see Adams glancing at them and then saying, “Mr. Dickinson, this is not an appropriate time...” “Mr. Adams, can you not respond? Do you not desire an end to talk of war?” Adams seemed struck by Dickinson’s words, looked at him for a long moment. “Mr. Dickinson, if you believe that all that has fallen upon us is merely talk, I have no response. There is no hope of avoiding a war, sir, because the war has already begun. Your king and his army have seen to that. Please, excuse me, sir.” Adams began to walk away, and Franklin could see Dickinson look back at the growing crowd behind him, saw a strange desperation in the man’s expression, and Dickinson shouted toward Adams, “There is no sin in hope!
— Jeff Shaara, Rise to Rebellion
I'm American. Like I told you. And I'm American and not something else because they failed that day. They couldn't do it and most of them probably knew they couldn't do it before they even started, but they went anyhow. There's honor in that. I don't reckon there's much honor left in the world now, but they had it that day and I honor them on both sides by knowing what I can about it. Much as I can.
— Lance Weller, Wilderness
You must live a very free life.""Me?" she laughed. "I am not who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!""Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but...I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere.
— Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle
As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.
— James Lee Burke, Creole Belle
She looked at her note cards and took a breath. "Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald's. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France, where the Government isn't privatized, they still have to pay tax and do whatever the Government says, which would really suck. In USA countries, we respect individual rights and let people do whatever they want.
— Max Barry
Because even though you're dating five other women, I think I'm cheating on you.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
— Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
This won't stop her from getting elected," Shane said. "Stupider people get elected all the time. It's America. We love the sleazy. And the crazy." "I would like to think better of us," Claire said, "but yeah. You're right.
— Rachel Caine, Bitter Blood
[I]t is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or of any number of men, at the entering into society to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights, when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are life, liberty, and property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up an essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right of freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
— Samuel Adams
The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.
— Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
What manner of men had lived in those days...who had so eagerly surrendered their sovereignty for a lie and a delusion? Why had they been so anxious to believe that the government could solve problems for them which had been pridefully solved, many times over, by their fathers? Had their characters become so weak and debased, so craven and emasculated, that offers of government dole had become more important than their liberty and their humanity? Had they not know that power delegated to the government becomes the club of tyrants? They must have known. They had their own history to remember, and the history of five thousand years. Yet, they had willingly and knowingly, with all this knowledge, declared themselves unfit to manage their own affairs and had placed their lives, which belonged to God only, in the hands of sinister men who had long plotted to enslave them, by wars, by "directives," by "emergencies." In the name of the American people, the American people had been made captive.
— Taylor Caldwell, The Devil's Advocate
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
America's health care system is second only to Japan, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, well ... all of Europe. But you can thank your lucky starts we don't live in Paraguay!
— Matt Groening
You know what these “God Bless America” people oughta do? They oughta check with that Jesus fellow they’re so crazy about. They’re always talking about “What would Jesus do?” They don’t wanna know so they can do it – they just wanna know so they can tell other people to do it!
— George Carlin
Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is ‘open-minded’ and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.
— Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World
Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can’t play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you’ve got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that’s how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is.
— Wynton Marsalis
When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?
— Harold Edmund Stearns, America And The Young Intellectual
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right
—  it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
It’s just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.
— Andy Rooney
The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s just nothing else you’re going to taste that’s as sweet.
— Wynton Marsalis
Stain not the glory of your worthy ancestors, but like them resolve never to part with your birthright; be wise in your deliberations, and determined in your exertions for the preservation of your liberties. Fllow not the dictates of passion, but enlist yourselves under the sacred banner of reason; use every method in your power to secure your rights.
— Joseph Warren
I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
And it is undeniably true that the greatest and most important right of a British subject is that he shall be governed by no laws but those to which he, either in person or by his representatives, hath given his consent; and this, I will venture to assert, is the great basis of British freedom; it is interwoven with the Constitution, and whenever this is lost, the Constitution must be destroyed.
— Joseph Warren
One day I was telling him that I thought that cars had replaced guns as phallic symbols for American men, and I thought it was interesting that he had one that was so small and fast. The next day he gave me the Datsun and went out and bought a Lincoln.
— Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue
The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.
— Bill Ripley, Prisoners
He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.
— Barack Obama
In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.
— Chaim Potok
The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher’s eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner’s lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
— Anna Myers, Spy!
In a lot of ways that poor little potato' – Evan pointed directly at Jade’s French fries – 'symbolizes the reckless consumerism that plagues America.
— Francine Pascal, Straight Up
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before.
— Herbert Hoover
- Just that. Your family must be very different from mine.- I’d say so. - I laughed. - For one, no one wears their tiaras to breakfast.- Maxon smiled. - More of a dinner thing at the Singer house?”- “Of course.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
You’re too beautiful for your own good. Once you leave, we’ll have to send some of the guards with you. You’ll never survive on your own, poor thing.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
He reached up and tugged his ear. And I did the same.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
No wonder I’d never had any friends. I was shockingly bad at it.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
I let myself be sad. I let myself think of him.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
Great. Now the queen thought I was a misfit, too.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
The Swendish queen— whose name I couldn’t pronounce to save my life.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
Yeah, Mom, I’ll just keep telling the prince that he has absolutely no shot with me and offend him as often as I can. Great plan.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
Prolific irony - For 8 years, the finger on the button that could end the world belonged to a president who couldn't pronounce the word "nuclear.
— T. Rafael Cimino, Mid Ocean
if you like the lovable sound of an asthma attack in your ear every time you tell a joke.
— Kiera Cass
No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.
— Thomas Jefferson
We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.
— H.L. Mencken
One if by land, two if by sea.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.
— George Washington
Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning?
— I did.
It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.It's halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared, because this isn't a game.The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.I've seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn't understand each other. It seems like we've lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that's what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can't find a way, then we'll make one.All that matters now is what's ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And, how do we win?Detroit's showing us it can be done. And, what's true about them is true about all of us.This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines.Yeah, it's halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.
— Clint Eastwood
My non American viewers. Who understand that the world does not consist solely of a single nation sailing across an infinite sea of migrant workers. Will no doubt have heard that the waters surrounding Brisbane got tired of waiting for people to hit the beach and decided to bring the party to us.
— Yahtzee Croshaw
it's difficult to root for America when the villains of the story live in a ditch and are armed with jagged rocks. At some point in recent years they looked up from their international heroism to realize they'd alienated the entire world.
— Yahtzee Croshaw
Of all America’s natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony.
— Markham Shaw Pyle
How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
— Paul Sweeney
America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness...
— Lance Morrow
Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the 20th century is that they tread the same path.
— Winston  Churchill
I wonder if she’s infatuated enough to let me lock her in a box with me on a cool fall day and make love like America depends on us.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
If America runs on Dunkin', do I detect a slight limp?
— Josh Stern
For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians.
— Markham Shaw Pyle
The picture of me just after I’d found out Aspen was saving up to marry me. I looked radiant, hopeful, beautiful. I looked like I was in love. And some idiot thought that love was for Prince Maxon.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. In her hands was a sign that said RED-HEADS RULE! with a little crown painted in the corner and tiny stars everywhere. I knew I was the only redhead in the competition, and I noticed that her hair and mine were very nearly the same shade.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
My shoes I got to pick. I chose worn-out red flats. I figured I should make it clear from the start that I wasn’t princess material.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
So here I was expecting at the very best a cordial welcome from the girls who were prepared to fight me to the death for someone I didn’t want. Instead I was embraced.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
I don’t think any girl in all of Illéa could have been smiling more than me.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
I had to stop myself from laughing. Who needs help taking a pill?
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
He wasn’t allowed to come with me there—my own rule for thislittle adventure.No more.Good-bye, Aspen.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
So far, I had a solid collection of my honest opinions…
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
She must have been debating staying in the line or forcing me to run home and change.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
And Carolina will be cheering on the beautiful daughter of Magda and Shalom Singer, the new Lady America Singer!
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
I thought about the cameras following me in the terminal and pictured my family watching my entrance on TV. I hoped they’d be proud.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.
— Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.
— Jean Baudrillard, America
According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy
Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn’t that the American dream in a nutshell.
— Josh Stallings, Beautiful, Naked & Dead
It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.
— William R.  Bowen, American Government in Christian Perspective
Whether or not, he felt very much at home in this state. It was to places like this that they had sent him all over the world in defense of New York, until he had come almost to believe that the concrete caverns and towers he seemed dimly to remember, the pale people themselves, were no more than childhood fantasies he had dreamed for himself. He had felt little urge to try to find them again. Hopefully he had followed the Cat out to the new coast, only to find there the same grotesque imaginary cities already erected and fanatically maintained by old children. It was his loss alone that he could not play at their game with them, but he could not. He had been born in New York, taught the rules in New York and New England, yet it seemed to him that he had been holding his breath until he reached Arivada, New Africa. Here the dream cities, no matter whether adobe or gold, had long ago been abandoned, thus had collapsed, and all that remained was the earth. It spread around him as drab and coarse as an old army blanket, inviting only those weary with fighting or dying, overlooked by the children. If still in one piece the whole world would look like this in old age - Arivada was ready, but could Manhattan support mesquite?
— Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall
We think too much and feel too little.
— Charlie Chaplin
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
— Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
— William Blake
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
— Ayn Rand
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
I thought, possibly, that what I really needed was to go where nobody knew me and start over again, with none of my previous decisions, conversations, or expectations coming with me.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Don’t love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.
— نزار قباني
Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.
— David Levithan, Every Day
A thought comes when it will, not when I will.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.
— Robert Fanney
Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete proving nature's laws wrong it learned 2 walkwithout having feet
— Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete
If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
— Jack Handey
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
I dislike interaction. The less I say the better I feel. I was naturally a loner. I didn’t want conversation, or to goanywhere. I didn’t understand other people who wanted to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I was drawn toall the wrong things: I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What Ireally wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. Relationships never worked with me. I alwayslost interest. I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings.
— Charles Bukowski
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.
— Alexander Graham Bell
ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary and Other Works
Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought.Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Heretics and Heresies: From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
— Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
— Stanley Kubrick
Fuck rational thought
— George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty
Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly.When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question. I’ve been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me?
— Jack London, Мартин Иден
Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.
— Fay Weldon
Boring is the right thought at the wrong time.
— Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things
We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats
Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.
— George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
— Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say
Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.
— H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.
— Steven Pinker
To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.
— Ilyas Kassam, Reminiscence of the Present: Spiritual Encounters of the Analytically Insane
take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...
— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
— Brad Warner
It felt so amazing to be alive I could never think of anything else.
— Marty Rubin
Even dead fallen leaves go a long way with the wind before getting crushed.
— Basith, Autopsy of the seasons
Every woman whether rich or poor, married or single, has a circle of influence within which, according to her character, she is exerting a certain amount of power for good or harm. Every woman, by her virtue or her vice, by her folly or her wisdom, by her levity or her dignity, is adding something to our national elevation or degradation. A community is not likely to be overthrown where woman fulfills her mission, for by the power of her noble heart over the hearts of others, she will raise that community from its ruins and restore it again to prosperity and joy.
— John Angell James
I'd say we're all just ghosts on a wire seeking the prick of an electric thought.
— Robert Fanney
The same thought resonates.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
We are treasure chests with more jewels inside than we can imagine.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Towel and talk, how similar are they, both wipes dry water. One on the hate and latter in the head.
— Aphole
In that one stolen second, I considered the Glebe girl. She entered my mind like a burglar, them vanished again, taking nothing. It was like the humiliation of the past had been dragged instantly from my back and left somewhere on the ground.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
If someone gets irritated with your presence, then move out. You have no space there.
— Saga Valsalan
Thinking! Thinking! The process should no longer be merely this feeble flurry of hailstones that raises a little dust. It should be something quite different. Thinking should be a terrifying process. When the earth thinks, whole towns crumble to the ground and thousands of people die.Thinking: raising boulders, hollowing out valleys, preparing tidal waves at sea. Thinking like a town: that's to say: eight million inhabitants, twelve million rats, nine million pints of carbon dioxide, two billion tons. Grey light. Cathedral of light. Din. Sudden flashes. Low-lying blanket of black cloud. Flat roofs. Fire alarms. Elevators. Streets. Eighteen thousand miles of streets. 145 million electric light bulbs.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.
— Raymond Queneau
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. 
— George Orwell
Milk for infant as liquor for adult.
— Toba Beta
Every leaf before it falls must think itself immortal.
— Marty Rubin
Fire burns through thought.
— Marty Rubin
Why, human thought is a real element, a real force, darting out like electricity from every man's or woman's mind, injuring or relieving, killing or curing, building fortunes or tearing them down, working for good or ill, every moment, night or day, asleep or awake, carving, moulding and shaping people's faces and making them ugly or agreeable.
— Prentice Mulford, Thoughts Are Things
These mods made significant improvements to the cars – enough so that I changed my mind (another procedure altogether) every time I thought of selling the damn thing and buying a Toyota. I hope you benefit from this and preserve your ailing finances!Good luck!
— Christina Engela, Bugspray
Monsieur Beulier never engaged in thought except to speak the truth, and never spoke except to express his thought.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.
— Blaise Pascal, The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal
When you enjoy a thought or activity, it's irrelevant whether it's meaningful or not.
— Marty Rubin
Bears find themselves at the spot where two deep-seated but contradictory human impulses collide: the desire to feel protected from unforeseeable danger and the longing for unspoiled nature.
— Bernd Brunner, Bears: A Brief History
Moments later, Sona Kilroy, heading for the open doorway, stepped over the sergeant’s body. With an old auto-rifle in his left hand and his favorite sword in the other, and the sharp melodic din of bolts and bullets ringing in his ears, ‘the Hammer’ grinned an evil grin to himself, well pleased. He wished he could’ve seen the look on the face of Indomitable’s captain when he realized the tables had just been turned on him! The thought amused him. It was bloody hilarious. He cackled, reveling in this complete reversal of fortune. Then he stalked onward with conviction, a grim smile on his lips – intent on taking the ship for himself. * * *
— Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning
There are so many things we do in life that define the real meaning of our lives. There are so many ideas that come to us each moment of time. There are so many things we conceive each day which give birth to things that define who we are and how we are living life. Everybody knows something and everybody thinks about something! A true value of our lives is not just in what we conceive each moment of time, but also in how we nurture and give life to what we conceive, against all odds, to give birth to something that defines who we are and who we become in the end!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The core issue in monotheism is righteousness/wickedness. Righteous/wicked qualifies a person acting or being Good/bad.In an environment of scarcity, man’s vital strategy for collective survival hinges on being good to his clan and bad to rival clans to acquire or defend resources.So the creation/elaboration/nurture of both good and bad can only be the consequence of a primary cause: scarcity.Monotheism “Revealing” such a mental disadvantage in a Creator as to confuse consequences for causes is … revelatory.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian
You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.
— Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist
DIVINE NECESSITY creates “others” even among family members who become good to be killed by family members…HUMAN NECESSITY commands man to resurrect the supposed reason for which God supposedly shattered humanity in Babylon:The “Covenant” among men.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
I have yet to understand the ritual of sacrifice in monotheism; to a supposed Creator who has supposedly given us what we will be eventually sacrificing.If I take a small mirror and reflect sunlight back to the sun, am I sacrificing to the sun?
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
I wonder how much space I take up, if a thought can take up secondary space.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Very little is given to how we should think about essential matters
— Sunday Adelaja
You should not think on a small scale
— Sunday Adelaja
One cannot walk in such regions, consciouslywithout enlargement of thought. There areheights and valleys which, to those who seekthem in a sympathetic spirit, are better" seats of learning " than any school or university in the land ; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life.
— Henry Stephens Salt, On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
The journey of life is much about connections! One thing connects with another to bring another thing! When things get connected well, things work well! The right connections between all the things we do during the day show what we did with our lives at the end of the day and how we lived our entire days on earth to leave worthy and indelible footprints or an otherwise footprint! Mind your connections!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Detoxify your thought and be free
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Uncanny situations
—  reasons to ponder for action!
No matter what, you shall have a reason for action because of whom and what is closer to you and where you find yourself.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
Osaka: Ah always wanted to go to the ocean and rifd a dolphin.Sakaki: ...That would be nice.Osaka: Ah know, right?(Osaka and Sakaki stare at the ocean lost in thought; Sakaki imagining riding a dolphin).Yomi: Look at you two space cadets. What's going on?Osaka: We was thinkin' 'bout 'Roids.Sakaki: Eh... No... =,o
— Kiyohiko Azuma, Azumanga Daioh: The Omnibus
It is too ordinary for us to think we are too ordinary. It is too unwise for us to think we are too wise. It is too sinful for us to think we are too sinful beyond pardon. It would be too unrighteous for us to think we are too righteous. There is always something we may think about, but let us think about something!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
He who don’t know what envy can do shall always do what envy can do
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
You write a thought down because you want to see what next as a thought is going to come out.
— Deyth Banger
But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;And time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,But that the earthy and cold hand of deathLies on my tongue
— William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1
The waves formed in your heart will make you fall in Love.The waves formed in your mind will make you fall from Life.
— Saga Valsalan
What's the feeling everyday somebody to say right in your face lie... ( like a woman which sucks your dick and your semen goes right in hermouth) and you can't do anything on this problem??And what to tell you move on, soon or later??
— Deyth Banger
He thought about it for a minute. The kitty was only around seven thousand give or take a gold tooth and some coinage – minus the ship – which must’ve been worth well, a lot more than seven thousand, even in scrap metal. An alarm was going off somewhere, faintly.
— Christina Engela, Loderunner
We will always think about a change of attitude from others. Will we ever think about the same in ourself?
— Saga Valsalan
It feels good not to think about anything that wears on me. We all need that kind of of room in our lives.
— Ron Baratono
I never thought I am going to be so followed and to see my stuff and on some other places... so I want to say big Thanks to all.
— Deyth Banger
Don't bother about those who can't understand you, because they don't deserve you for what you are.
— Saga Valsalan
The greatest excuse you must have is the excuse to do your best to the very best and in a distinctive manner
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
You do not necessarily lose concentration
—  you only allow something else to take control of a greater portion of your attentiveness and attention at any given moment of time.
The mere fact that a boxer covers his face never means that he is much afraid of his opponent. A good punch will give a better explanation for his action!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
A simple change in mindset in a moment can change a whole set in a moment.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Never ever continue to complain of lack of time all the time for no one is in possession of all the time.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I've seen what rational thought leads to. Dumbest people I ever met were intellectuals.
— Robert Ferrigno, Heart of the Assassin