Penn Quotes

A man in business must put up many affronts if he loves his own quiet. ~ William Penn

At about the end of the eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: "But suppose I don't find anything before election day?"

The Boss said, "To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it."

We clocked off five miles more, and I said, "But suppose there isn't anything to find."

And the Boss said, "There is always something."

And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."

And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

Two miles more, and he said, "And make it stick."

And that was all a good while ago. And Masters is dead now, as dead as a mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the gray damp wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son." And the Boss is dead, who said to me, "And make it stick."

Little Jackie made it stick, all right. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Poker would have never gotten on TV when we only had three networks. ~ Penn Jillette

I think voting for the lesser of two evils in game theory always leads to more evil. ~ Penn Jillette

Ree is his. Is his, is devoted to him, is aggravatingly tender and possessively passionate and wrapped up in him in a thousand ways, loves him in a way that is very useful. It seems a law of nature, at this point. Even if the events of this startling evening have served to give him pause, a little. But Ree is still his. He's fairly sure. Such complex knots can't be untied so quickly, can they?

Still, it's not the only thing disturbing him, about the Dam's account of early events. She laughs when she sees his face, his sidewise look at her description, and there's definitely a mean note to it. "Oh, it was darling," she says, and he gets the feeling of a caged animal stuck behind bars, while a cruel child pokes at it. "You were enchanted by his wolf, would follow it anywhere, welcome or not, though mostly he tolerated it. But you couldn't manage his name – and a nickname hadn't stuck at that point – so instead you imitated the sound he made. Rather insultingly, too, if not intentionally – Ruff. Or Woof, or whatever it was that you intended to say, except that it actually came out as Wuff. Or Wuffy, depending, and at varying pitches and volume as you ran after him, falling down and rolling about half the time."

Penn is transfixed. It's outrageous, it's an outrage. It can't possibly be true. It was nothing like that. ~ Alex Ankarr

It is a human defect
to try to know one's self by the self of another. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world - and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. ~ Penn Jillette

When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life. ~ Sean Penn

For though Death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that is recompence enough for suffering of it. ~ William Penn

I could see, in the haze to the north, the tall stacks of the mighty Borden phosphate and fertilizer plant in Bradenton, spewing lethal fluorine and sulphuric-acid components into the vacation sky. In the immediate area it is known bitterly as the place where Elsie the Cow coughed herself to death. I have read where it had been given yet another two years to correct its massive and dangerous pollution. Big Borden must have directors somewhere. Maybe, like the Penn Central directors, they are going to sit on their respective docile asses until the roof falls in. There are but two choices. Either they know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn, or they don't know they condone poisoning and don't give a damn. Anybody can walk into any brokerage office and be told where to look to find a complete list of the names of the directors and where they live. Drop the fellows a line, huh? ~ John D. MacDonald

If you look at UFC champions: BJ Penn - terrifying! GSP - terrifying! Anderson Silva - terrifying! But I'm not terrifying. I am not the super-submission guy, I am not the one-punch KO guy, so I am not the most feared guy in the worldBut I will not quit, I will not break and I will fight you like a dog for every second of every round. I am not a super-talented guy, I'm just a dude who will fight you tooth and nail. ~ Forrest Griffin

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights) ~ Jonathan Santlofer

The water cooler conversation in every job I've had is sports, it's what did you do this weekend, it's 'How are your parents doing?' ~ Kal Penn

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer. ~ Irving Penn

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to
make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,
as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have
Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those that
are full of precious Drugs.
They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level
Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the
Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have
need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the
Weather. ~ William Penn

This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals. ~ William A. Ewing

What would you have asked of me if I took the sea glass?'
'To save me all your firsts, ~ L.J. Shen

You were never a drizzle, Penn Scully. When I fell for you, you came beating down, and I felt you everywhere. You were hail. ~ L.J. Shen

Even if I disagree with Obama on many, many things, he is certainly qualified to be president. He is certainly competent to be president. ~ Penn Jillette

Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times. ~ James Gray

Since its founding in 1854, Penn State has proven to be a leading institution of higher learning. ~ Tim Holden

Between a Man and his Wife nothing ought to rule but Love. Authority is for Children and Servants; yet not without Sweetness. ~ William Penn

She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to start up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse ... She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company. ~ Robert Penn Warren

If men be good, government cannot be bad. ~ William Penn

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about. ~ Robert Penn Warren

De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself. ~ Christopher Meloni

But listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. ~ Robert Penn Warren

It comes down to having fun and doing what I love. ~ B.J. Penn

I have great respect for Sean Penn. It's like most relationships that fail. It's not one thing, it's many thing that go on over a period of time. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Dislike what deserves it, but never hate: for that is of the nature of malice; which is almost ever to persons, not things, and is one of the blackest qualities sin begets in the soul. ~ William Penn

From now on, anyone raped at Penn State should just tell Joe Paterno's statue. It couldn't help you any less than the real Joe would have. ~ Jim Norton

Hey," the cabbie yelled. "How's about a tip?"
"You bet-ski," Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. "Don't kiss strange men in Penn Station. ~ Libba Bray

Uber, which raised $1.2 billion this month at a valuation of $40 billion, said in August it had sought a legal opinion and that its Seoul service obeys the law. Opposition to its operations is down to outdated regulations that precede smartphone and wireless technology, Allen Penn, the company's head of Asia, told reporters at the time. Paid transportation with unregistered vehicles is "clearly illegal activity," South Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said later that month. The maximum penalty for Uber's alleged legal violation is a two-year prison sentence or a fine of nearly $20,000, Yonhap News reported Wednesday. ~ Anonymous

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference. ~ Penn Jillette

The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. ~ William Penn

Haste makes work which caution prevents. ~ William Penn

I'm not denying there's got to be a notion of right to get business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to do at school to hear the bang. The ~ Robert Penn Warren

Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core. ~ Irving Penn

Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet. ~ Mark Helprin

Clear therefore thy head, and rally, and manage thy thoughts rightly, and thou wilt save time, and see and do thy business well; for thy judgment will be distinct, thy mind free, and the faculties strong and regular. ~ William Penn

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. ~ William Penn

Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Good actors go to emotional places where nobody else wants to go. ~ Arthur Penn

When I watched the Twin Towers fall, I said aloud to my naked friend, "There go our civil liberties." A few months later I called George Carlin and we were chatting about America's reaction to the attack. I told him my thoughts. He excused himself, put down the phone, and went and got his journal. As the Twin Towers fell, he had written, "There go our civil rights." I was so proud to have had a similar thought at a similar time to a genius. We were sad to be right. To react to an attack on our freedom with less freedom seems so deeply un-American. What ever happened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and "fuck you in the fucking neck"? ~ Penn Jillette

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing. ~ Penn Jillette

I ought to have guessed that a person like her
a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us
I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer. ~ Robert Penn Warren

We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up. ~ Penn Dayton Badgley

Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away? ~ Robert Penn Warren

Anybody who's in favor of gun control is a fucking moron. ~ Jackie Mason

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things. ~ Sean Penn

He that lives in love lives in God. ~ William Penn

I live in Vegas, and I see people by the side of the road with cardboard signs who seem like they might have tried that spending their way out of debt thing. ~ Penn Jillette

It was William Penn who said, "Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it." Brent knew that there was nothing right about this place and the way the prisoners were treated, and he was determined to do whatever he could to change that. ~ Kenneth Eade

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Writing is about you. Publishing is about the book. Marketing is about the reader. ~ Joanna Penn

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world. ~ William Penn

The amount of work that TV writers and executives do is incredibly hard. I'm shocked that these people will hand in three outlines and two scripts, and everybody has to read them and give notes on all of them, even the writers. ~ Zak Penn

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don't open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what's in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I can look at her face all fucking day. I wish it were a legit job so I could make money doing it. I would put in all the extra hours and become a billionaire within a year. ~ L.J. Shen

I like movies that are scary, but I don't want them to be dirt dumb. I want a movie that gets my blood racing, makes me laugh, but also gives me something to think about, with maybe a little sexy thrown in. Hollywood doesn't make movies like that. ~ Penn Jillette

I'm not saying that I've cheated, being in an intense love with somebody while also feeling the pulls of being a young man, especially being an object of attention. ~ Penn Dayton Badgley

You can't believe how pro-gay and pro-freedom-of-speech I am. I'm way out beyond anyone on the Left. ~ Penn Jillette

The spirit of [William] Penn will not be stayed. You cannot set limits to such knightly adventurers. After their own day is gone their spirits stalk the world, carrying inspiration everywhere that they go and reminding men of the lineage, the fine lineage, of those who have sought justice and right. ~ Woodrow Wilson

I have more contact with people who consume, for lack of a better word, my product than any other performers. ~ Penn Jillette

I think you start to prepare the minute you read something. ~ Sean Penn

The air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you've been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened. ~ Robert Penn Warren

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time. ~ Robert Penn Warren

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves (William Penn)- It was painfully true. I ended up hurting far more than anyone else whenever I allowed jealousy to infect me. ~ Gillibran Brown

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. ~ William Penn

Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness. ~ Penn Jillette

This I believe: I believe there is no God. ~ Penn Jillette

I'll get mobbed by literally 40 school girls. It's like being a full fledged star, and that's surreal. ~ Penn Dayton Badgley

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world. ~ William Penn

What is man but his passion? ~ Robert Penn Warren

There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?
If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.
These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.
He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied ~ R.A. Lafferty

True Godliness doesn't turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it ... We have nothing that we can call our own; no, not our selves: for we are all but Tenants, and at Will, too, of the great Lord of our selves, and the rest of this great farm, the World that we live upon. ~ William Penn

That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity. ~ Penn Jillette

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page. ~ Irving Penn

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. ~ G.K. Chesterton

My first 'Daily Show' piece was pretending I had this terrible immigrant journey, so I went to talk to an immigration lawyer who would help out people, and I ran into him in Penn Station about three months after I'd gotten the green card. I said, 'I got my green card yesterday.' And he hugged me because he understood that level of relief. ~ John Oliver

One of the strongest feelings you can get in life
one of the most rewarding feelings
is the feeling of an "Aha, I finally understand." ~ Penn Jillette

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend ha ~ Robert Penn Warren

Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith. ~ Penn Jillette

I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point. ~ Joanna Penn

History is all explained by geography. ~ Robert Penn Warren

The usefullest truths are plainest; and while we keep to them, our differences cannot rise high. ~ William Penn

Cable news is more titillating to talk about who's up and who's down and all that nonsense as opposed to what's actually done. ~ Kal Penn

If you like the stuff I do, my chances of liking you go up. ~ Penn Jillette

I've always loved music. I listen to music the way a lot of actors watch movies. ~ Penn Badgley

'400 Blows' was so much like my own childhood, it really stunned me. ~ Arthur Penn

Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director. ~ Sean Penn

( ... ) the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too. ~ Robert Penn Warren

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly. ~ Sean Penn

In the late twentieth century we consider solitude our natural condition. Mates divorce, and even friendship is diagnosed as a disorder - co-dependency. So the concept of living a life interlocked with another human is unthinkable ~ Penn Jillette

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures. ~ William Penn

Counterintuitive action makes a fellow feel smart. ~ Penn Jillette

A man, like a watch, is to be valued for his manner of going. ~ William Penn

There is no country but the heart. ~ Robert Penn Warren