Invitations To The World Quotes

Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school. ~ Richard Peck

Conformity is the enemy of friendship ~ Richard Peck

If we want to secure the best jobs in the future, we must make America the best place in the world to do business. ~ Jim DeMint

I said to John, "You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?" John said, "I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog." I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect. ~ David Wong

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man. ~ Clarence Darrow

I'm not much of a correspondent. My letters are not only uninteresting but sparse. I'm glad I don?t have to write for a living. It?s arduous work and the money is very uncertain. On those rare occasions when I wander into a bookstore it amazes me to see the avalanche of literature and semi-literature that is turned out weekly in this country. The people who write these things are either desperate for money or love starved. Why should anyone on a nice balmy day lock oneself in an office and hit a typewriter for hours on end. I think one of the greatest pleasures in the world is not writing ... ~ Groucho Marx

To me, my nephew is the angel of my world. It is my absolute happiest moment whenever he smiles at me. ~ Li Bingbing

Somebody once observed
and the observation did him credit, whoever he was
that the dearest things in the world were neighbors' eyes, for they cost everybody more than anything else contributing to housekeeping. ~ Albert Richard Smith

Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it's gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center. ~ Michael Scheuer

Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we'll continue to call him John, though we don't know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language - Greek rather than Aramaic - and with a completely different level of education .. The author of John is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus's words; they are John's words placed on Jesus's lips. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

The most horrible wickedness and cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have troubled the human race began with this thing called revelation, or revealed religion ... It would be far, far better for us to let a thousand devils roam the world, and publicly preach the doctrine of devils (if there were such a thing, which there isn't), than to let one impostor and monster such a Moses, Joshua, Samuel or the Bible prophets come speaking the so-called word of God, and causing men to believe it. ~ Thomas Paine

It wasn't until I was seventeen and moved away to college that I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers. When ~ Hope Jahren

Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away. ~ Jello Biafra

...she had uncovered brushes to paint him with the rainbow when the world had left him blank. It served both a blessing and a curse to fall so deeply in love with a dream. ~ Sunny Nicolette

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It's just that we can't rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out. ~ Matt Haig

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty. [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.] ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The two of them against each other. The two of them against the world. Everything in their lives was now defined by that binary. If they had to die today in order to live, it would somehow be wrong if they didn't do it together. ~ Neal Shusterman

My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose … How could either of these books carry fire and sword round half the world? It beats me. [writing to George Bernard Shaw] ~ John Maynard Keynes

What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open. ~ Suad Amiry

We are in a race between knowledge and catastrophe. If we keep track of what is important, never lower our standards or forget why we are here, we have the ability to determine the fate of the world. ~ Dean Kamen

Minus: Papa, I'm scared. When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality burst open. Do you understand?

David: I do.

Minus: Reality burst open, and I tumbled out. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything.

David: I know.

Minus: I can't live in this new world.

David: Yes, you can. But you must have something to hold on to.

Minus: What would that be? A god? Give me proof of God. You can't.

David: Yes, I can. But you have to listen carefully.

Minus: Yes, I need to listen.

David: I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It is to know that love exists as something real in the human world.

Minus: A special kind of love, I suppose?

David: All kinds, Minus. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love.

Minus: And the longing for love?

David: Longing and denial. Trust and distrust.

Minus: Then love is the proof?

David: I don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself.

Minus: To you, love and God are the same thing.

David: That thought helps me in my emptiness and despair.

Minus: Tell me more, Papa.

David: Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, Minus, from a death sentence.

Minus: Papa... If it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God, since ~ Ingmar Bergman

This is where the world is going: direct access from anywhere to any type of data, whether it's a small piece of data or a small answer but a long algorithm to create that answer. The user doesn't care about this. ~ Hasso Plattner

If we forget that the newspapers are footnotes to Scripture and not the other way around, we will finally be afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Too many of us spend far too much time with the editorial page and not nearly enough with the prophetic vision. We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God's Word. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world
this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world
no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness. ~ Shauna Niequist

'Jurassic Park' doesn't belong to America; it belongs to the whole world. ~ Colin Trevorrow

From beyond the grave,
Hannah says that although living in the world of plurality and natality is no picnic, if we want to avoid Auschwitz or the Gulag or Stonewall or Pol Pot or Attica or ISIS, we as a species have no choice but to embrace it and endure it.

In other words, there is no single answer, no single bullet of understanding to guide us, just a glorious neverending mess. The neverending mess of true human freedom. ~ Ken Krimstein

But when we place God on our side of things, that we are now ridding the world of evil - that's very dangerous, that one nation has this role to rid the world of evil. What about the evil we have committed, that we are complicit in? ~ Jim Wallis

I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world. ~ Robert Kennedy

One of the best tricks a garden plays is that you never quite remember how it's going to be, that first day after winter has gone, when you go outside and can stay outside all day fiddling with jobs that aren't pressing enough to weigh heavily but will nevertheless pay dividends. A garden is made up of a thousand small inventions, but each small act is a defence (defiance even) against a world without anchors or safe harbours. ~ Anna Pavord

And what about yellowback dogs who'd use children to kill the whole world from ambush, my friend? The whole universe?" The Weasel blinked at that, as if he'd expected no such reply. Perhaps any reply at all. "I had . . . my orders. ~ Stephen King

Sometimes knowing is torture. You wish you could hide your secret away in a dark, cobwebby shed, shut the door, and break the key in the lock, so no one can ever get in again. You wish that you could go to sleep and have your last thought be anything but the buttery light of the New Mexico moon sneaking in through the cracks of an old barn's walls. But you can't erase the knowing, and you can never tell your secret. If there is one thing this world as taught me, it's that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse. Secrets should stay secrets. It keeps them tolerable. Telling secrets turn them into full-on hell. ~ Tawni Waters

In the time you will live, there will be heroes around. Simple men, honest men who work two jobs, go to school, raise a family, and serve our God. An older couple who have the courage to seek out the truth while enduring the scorn and ridicule of their children and friends. A young man, a special spirit, who will take on a body that is deformed- and yet you will never see hime unhappy or without a smile on his face. A young mother who will care for a daughter while she suffers a painful death, and yet never doubt or loose faith that her Father loves them both.
In your worl famous people will be hard to find. But you will be surrounded by heroes, you will meet them everyday. They will be the simple people who struggle but never give up, those who strive to be happy despite the cares of the physical world, those who dream of the day when they will find the truth, those who search for understanding as to why they were born, why there is pain, or what it all means, and yet continure to endure, knowing in their soul, somewhere deep inside, that there has to be an answer.
These are the heroes that our Father needs down on earth. And you will be a hero. We already know that. ~ Chris Stewart

I have been all over the world. I have met some wonderful people, lots of them very simple, whom nobody will ever hear about, but who have been fabulous to me. ~ Maureen Forrester

The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation. ~ Richard Pipes

You know, we live in a time when if somebody wants to kill you, they're going to kill you, and you can either go in a hole and, you know, pull the roof in over you, or you just continue putting one foot in front of the other and hope that you're doing some good in the world. ~ Gene Robinson

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. ~ Howard Zinn

The rival you both share is myself. I do not wish to marry ... First, because my past habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought I hated it. And now I have found I treasure it. I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband must expect me to become in marriage. My second reason is my present. I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied congenial work ... I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their faults. Their vices. But they are not those the world chooses to imagine. I have no genius myself, I have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways ... I believe I owe a debt to good fortune. I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be bereft. ~ John Fowles