Perhaps Quotations

'Contagion' should serve as a wake-up call not only about the germs, but perhaps more importantly about the frailty of governance, nationally and worldwide.

If you have something that you know is important to you and vital to you... then this will perhaps help people understand the importance of confronting it and being brave about it.

The inspiration to write? Perhaps it's not so much inspiration, as a NEED to write. I get itchy and guilty and dissatisfied when I haven't written for a while. Ideas come to me and need to be written down.

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength... it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Stem cells are being used for anti-aging, and the University of Miami is doing a study about that to prove that it is true. They are looking at me, and my markers have shown exactly that I have been actually reversing my aging and getting younger. I am taking perhaps more stem-cell treatment than anybody else in the world.

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.

I had a blast in the '90s, perhaps too much fun, and maybe I should have worked a lot harder and partied a lot less, but I definitely don't regret the 12 years I spent living out in L.A.

Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.

I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.

Ideas matter. The world matters. Our lives matter, and the choices we make as we navigate our lives perhaps matter most of all.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know.

Americans get it. They're ready for some opportunities to have greener communities, to have cleaner communities, and to have transportation options that perhaps they haven't had in the past.

There cannot be any better cross-section of America and I think the soldiers represent the best we have. Today's soldiers are brighter and smarter, perhaps in a different way, than past generations because they've been brought up in the computer and information age.

Not everything that happens in an in-person classroom is currently replicated with an online course, and perhaps the experience will never be the quite the same. But there are new opportunities that online learning opens up that would have never been possible without this technology.

Well, perhaps the greatest achievement, and we didn't know it at the time, was we held an Earth Day in 1970, and out of that Earth Day a lot of students got involved in saving the environment, or trying to.

No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.

I always wrote, you know, but it was just this thing I did; what I intended was to become a terribly famous artist, perhaps with a stopover as a singer.

At a relatively early age, I began to believe that building a business was perhaps the greatest opportunity for making an impact, because it's a tool for making a change in the world.

I first began to dry specimens for preservation carelessly perhaps at first, but before the season was over, I had collected between one and two hundred species.

Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed.

We lived in Northern Quebec, and the nearest school was thirty miles away, so my mother took on the task of home schooling me. She spoke to some friends, received some instructions from the provincial school board, and found some interesting books that perhaps I might find useful.

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

New York musicians rarely have the time for idle chat and conversation after a gig. Despite popular assumption of our scintillating after-hours, that illusion is overtaken by the constant hustle to juggle a part-time or full-time job, a myriad of errands, a second or third gig of the day, and perhaps a child or two somewhere.

A life-threatening illness or two certainly gives you an awareness of your own mortality. It heightens your sense of gratitude for things that previously, if you've not taken them for granted, you perhaps never appreciated how precious they were. That's almost a platitude, but one has to state the obvious.

Many of us live in dysfunctional families, and so even if it's in a fairy tale, or perhaps because it's in a fairy tale, we have a chance to look at that side of our reflected lives differently.

Perhaps we believe that everything travels by air, or magically and instantaneously like information (which is actually anchored by cables on the seabed), not by hefty ships that travel more slowly than senior citizens drive.

There is perhaps no more rewarding romance heroine than she who is not expected to find love. The archetype comes in many disguises - the wallflower, the spinster, the governess, the single mom - but always with one sad claim: Love is not in her cards.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Democrats' definition of 'rich' - always seems to be set just above whatever the salary happens to be for a member of Congress. Perhaps that says it all.

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

Perhaps an eccentric is just off centre - ex-centric. But that contradicts a belief of mine that we've got to be centrifugal.

I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.

Perhaps we should worry less about judging people for being Mormon or Baptist or Muslim or gay or straight or black or white or Latino or by their religious or political brands and worry more about electing thoughtful, serious and ethical politicians on both sides of the political isle who are willing to work together for progress.

When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.

It was inevitable that in doing this I should arrive at new results, and it is perhaps understandable that in the end I have felt impelled to present these results not only in the dry form of a catalogue, but also in a more connected and personal one.

Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games.

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers.

Man's nature is fundamentally good, or perhaps it is neither good nor evil. In any case, man is something to work on. We must hold fast to this fact - man is something to work on.

Forget the historic nature of his election having to do with skin color - Obama has an opportunity offered to few presidents: the chance to set the course of the nation for decades, if not generations, to come. Who knows: perhaps in the near future, our grandchildren will spend money with Obama's face on it.

There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Had I not come out with an inspirational CD, you perhaps would have never known that I feel like I feel, that all songs, all the music I've ever done is a gift from God.

As soon as the news of the Cabot voyages reached the King of Portugal he arranged to send an expedition of discovery to the far north-west, perhaps to find a northern sea route to Eastern Asia.

There were many influences on me while growing up. In the late Seventies and early Eighties when I was growing up in Hyderabad, it was a bit more laid-back, and that gave you time to think about things differently without perhaps being caught up in the narrow approach to one's journey through life.

Let me announce, with all the strength at my command, that I am not a terrorist and I never was, expect perhaps in the beginning of my revolutionary career. And I am convinced that we cannot gain anything through those methods.

'Ten Years Later' is about the journey six extraordinary people take with time. Each has experienced a game-changing event - perhaps a life-threatening illness or a catastrophic personal loss.

'Miss Rumphius' has been, perhaps, the closest to my heart. There are, of course, many dissimilarities between me and Alice Rumphius, but, as I worked, she gradually seemed to become my alter ego. Perhaps she had been that right from the start.

When I visit schools, I try to reach kids who perhaps don't have books at home or aren't that keen on reading. Somehow you draw them in with the pictures and then perhaps they'll want to learn more about it. I use a lot of audience participation and find kids who aren't really part of it and try to include them - to draw in those reluctant readers.

As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?

In articulating all my feelings about marriage equality, I almost don't know where to begin. And perhaps that's part of the problem. Why do we have to explain ourselves when it comes to issues of fairness and equality? Why is common sense not enough?

News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.

I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy - sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

In the United States, nobody needs to remind people of their own role or their own power in creating the future they want to see. Perhaps it is something that is almost written into your cultural DNA: a desire to answer your Founding Fathers' call to create a 'more perfect union.'

I think it's perhaps fair to say we've been one of the most influential Royal Commissions this country ever had and there's nothing we have said that isn't relevant to the present situation.

I was perhaps about 10 years old when a local farmer rang us up to say he had found a young badger and would we take it in. So we did; it was a female called Bessy and she lived in the boiler room. She was extremely intelligent, had a very low opinion of cats but loved the dogs. She was pretty well trained; she went in the car.

I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on the social life of the students because a lot of them were commuting from outer London.

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Global health issues remind us - perhaps more than any other issue - that we are all children of the same extended family.

The freedom to express yourself without fear - that perhaps is something we in the U.S. take for granted. It's almost inconceivable to think we would be afraid to express our opinions or thoughts, but that's not true for all parts of the world now, and certainly not before World War II.

After Nigeria, we are the second biggest black African nation. We are the headquarters of the African Union. We are the only African country that has never been colonized. This is perhaps the last surviving African civilization.

And, perhaps most importantly, regional conflicts will again and again confront us with a cruel choice between costly engagement and costly indifference.

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.

People who aren't complicated in real life come through as pretty bland on the screen. Most great performers are not very happy and well adjusted. Perhaps that's the price they pay for being originals.

The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.

Of all the myriad ways we define love, there is perhaps none more honest and powerful than this: Great love is rooted in great partnership.

Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.

I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.

God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.

I'd look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at the rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious.

There are several peculiarities that I share with children which, like having no front teeth, are perhaps more acceptable in the very young, but which, for better or worse, seem to be a part of my makeup.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like.

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

Not having a father always made you feel that perhaps you weren't quite the same as other people. You felt you weren't complete.

Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

Part of the joy of writing for kids is that you have to have a real adventure story. You can get really involved in the fantastic in a way that perhaps you can't so much in adult fiction.

A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding.

Americans have a profound longing for heroes - now perhaps more than ever. We need our explorers, our sports icons, our Medal of Freedom winners, our Nobel laureates. We need our Greatest Generation warriors, our 'Sully' Sullenbergers, our Neil Armstrongs. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat.

Our information network is much better protected than our railroad network, and someone who cracks a system is able to cause far less human damage than someone who derails a train. Why, then, has 'computer crime' caused so much hysteria? Perhaps because the public is so willing - eager, even - to be scared by bogeymen.

'Boom Bang a Bang' was a huge part of me, maybe a part that I didn't relish, and there might be psychological reasons for that - I was a child being made to do things I didn't want to do. I was perhaps an elitist, a bit of a snob.

No matter how beautiful and loved a cover may be, the jury on it remains uncommitted until the book has been in the world for a while. Perhaps bookstore buyers will be indifferent. Perhaps it will be lost on store shelves. Perhaps there's another book or two out there using the same or a similar photo.

Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we've seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates.

Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word 'bad' would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful.

I feel empathy for people who are trapped in a prison of self-consciousness in an uncomfortable way. We can be free, but we're so held back. So perhaps that's why I feel a duty to make my work. I feel liberated when I'm doing it, and I want other people to feel liberated through it.

I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.

I don't believe man is a woman's natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.