Policymaking Dictionary Quotes

In the dictionary, next to the word stress, there is a picture of a midsize mutant stuck inside a dog crate, wondering if her destiny is to be killed or to save the world. Okay, not really. But there should be. ~ James Patterson

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken. ~ Steven Pinker

If the reader needs a dictionary to read your book then the dictionary may turn out to be a more interesting read. ~ Ken Scott

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry ~ J.R. Moehringer

When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. ~ Neel Burton

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them. ~ Leila Aboulela

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side. ~ Mark Twain

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. ~ Ray Bradbury

If I'm a guy who doesn't seem so merry, It's just because I'm so misunderstood. When I was young I ate a dictionary, And that did not do me a bit of good. For I've absorbed so many words and phrases - They drive me dizzy when I want to speak. I start explaining but each person gazes As if I spoke in Latin or in Greek. ~ Ira Gershwin

In a modern dictionary, the noun "melancholy" has two definitions. First, it means "thoughtful or gentle sadness. ~ Joshua Wolf Shenk

In the secret pocket, she often kept a small
pocket dictionary, which she would take out whenever she encountered a word she did not know. ~ Lemony Snicket

And I'm not ready to tell you I'm in love with you, because I'm not. Not yet. But whatever this I'm feeling - it's so much more than like ... And for the past few weeks I've been trying to figure it out. I've been trying to figure out why there isn't some word to describe it. I want to tell you exactly how I feel but there isn't a single goddamned word in the entire dictionary that can describe this point between liking you and loving you, but I need that word ... "
"Living,"she finally whispers.
"I live you, Sky ... I live you so much. ~ Colleen Hoover

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten. ~ Frances Wright

Weird itself, even in the dictionary, is just something that is different and unexplainable. A weirdo is someone who follows their heart. Im definitely weird, aint nothing wrong with that. ~ Kid Cudi

I've been benefited from a dictionary definition I found that reads: "Rationalization is giving a socially acceptable reason for socially unacceptable behavior, and socially unacceptable behavior is a form of insanity. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous

Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone's guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely's vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely's usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, linipoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow's ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ~ Mark Helprin

I don't think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can't do everything. ~ Mukesh Ambani

I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

There is a certain blend of courage, integrity, character and principle which has no satisfactory dictionary name but has been called different things at different times in different countries. Our American name for it is "guts." ~ Louis Adamic

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's owns' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a natural and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin

Con-tu-ber-nal(noun). One who occupies
the same tent; a tent-fellow, comrade.
The thought of Percy Prewitt as my contubernal causes me to break out in hives.
-From the personal dictionary of
Caroline Trent ~ Julia Quinn

To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I looked up the word POLITICS in the dictionary, and it's actually a combination of two words: poli, which means 'many,' and tics, which means 'bloodsuckers.' ~ Jay Leno

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'. ~ Cal Thomas

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis
obviously an unproven one
that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~ Kahlil Gibran

If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary - as a verb. ~ Peter Thiel

[ ... ]Are both of you ... ?"
"Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen. ~ Damon Suede

On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It's the neighborhood of colleges and convents. ~ Patrick Modiano

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. ~ Samuel Johnson