Spence Quotes

The number one job of a leader is to protect the truth. ~ Roy Spence

If a person wants to be a part of your life, they will make an obvious effort to do so. Think twice before reserving a space in your heart for people who do not make an effort to stay. ~ John Spence

The operational word in every competent defense is attack. If you're explaining and defending, you're losing. ~ Gerry Spence

Fear is like a pack of dogs – it chases us, and if we try to run or hide from it the dogs will continue our chase until finally, exhausted, we fall and are devoured. ~ Gerry Spence

Our prejudices :;we all have them are part of our personality structure. The problem is that our prejudices may lie lurking at the bottom of the subterranean mind where the slowly ooze up and color our thinking without our knowing it. ~ Gerry Spence

Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender. ~ Gerry Spence

...that in every timeline of life there are no words that can transcend the things we feel. ~ Christian Strayhorn Spence

If we turn now to such vestiges of cult as are associated otherwise than with time and season, we discover a definite recognition of the survival of these nearly a century ago. Keightley, the old fairy mythologist, who did such yeoman service in the collection of much valuable elfin lore, says, as long ago as 1850, when referring to the confused nature of his subject: 'Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings (the larger and greater fairies) once formed part of ancient and exploded systems of religion and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved. ~ Lewis Spence

To ask of Love that it exist without jealousy is to ask of light that it cast no Shadows ~ P.N.Spence

I've the run of the place, and so i spend some time exploring, climbing steep stairs into thin turrets whose windows give me a bird's-eye view of the land surrounding Spence. I flit past locked doors and dark, paneled rooms that seem more like museum exhibits than living, breathing places. I wander until it is dark and past the time when I should be in bed, not that I think anyone shall be searching for me. ~ Libba Bray

When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery. ~ Gerry Spence

As I look through my box of photos, my eyes well up with tears as I hold in front of me, the one of my brother Spence when he was five years old. He looks so cute in his cowboy outfit, drawing his toy pistols as if he were having a showdown with nasty outlaws. ~ Terra Lorin

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief. ~ Gerry Spence

Reading has shaped me, guided me, reflected me and helped me understand and connect with, and this is not hyperbole, HUMANITY. ~ Annie Spence

The chief reason [Bill] O'Reilly is a conservative is that like all conservatives he offers no solutions for the major issues confronting those he pretends to champion--such as better wages, workable health insurance, education for every deserving child, controls on the corporate thugs that are destroying our earth, an unfettered national voice for the ordinary citizen, reform of the election laws of this country that permitted corporations to own the country and enslave the people. ~ Gerry Spence

Why are scientists now using lawyers in laboratory experiments instead of rats? Three reasons: (1) lawyers are more plentiful than rats, (2) there is no danger the scientists will become attached to the lawyers, and (3) there are some things rats just won't do. ~ Gerry Spence

All three of the English types I have mentioned can, I think, be accounted for as the results of the presence of different cultures, existing side by side in the country, and who were the creation of the folk in ages distantly removed one from another. In a word, they represent specific " strata" of folk-imagination. The most diminutive of all are very probably to be associated with a New Stone Age conception of spirits which haunted burial-mounds and rude stone monuments. We find such tiny spirits haunting the great stone circles of Brittany. The "Small People," or diminutive fairies of Cornwall, says Hunt, are believed to be "the spirits of people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago. "The spriggans, of the same area, are a minute and hirsute family of fairies" found only about the cairns, cromlechs, barrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky to meddle." Of these, the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and the Elizabethans appear to me to be the later representatives. The latter are certainly not the creation of seventeenth-century poets, as has been stated, but of the aboriginal folk of Britain. ~ Lewis Spence

Whatever you fill your brain with and whoever you spend your time with ... will determine your life a decade from now. ~ John Spence

Anyone can come into your life and say how much they love you. It takes someone really special to stay in your life and show how much they love you. ~ John Spence

Even though she could never be an actual librarian because her love for books is only matched by her disdain for the general public. ~ Annie Spence

I had joked about my bones being found by the roadside. Notify the four winds. Up here i might never be found. Keen-eyed vultures would pick the bones clean. Wind and rain would bleach them and in time they'd dissolve into the earth.
I looked up, and a gust of wind swirled the mist, and i saw that glint of gold, so close now, just up ahead. one last effort, to haul and drag myself up over ragged rocks, and at last I stood, breath rasping, limbs shaking, my body one long ache, covered in grime and thick greasy sweat, in front of Hakuyu's cave. The patch of colour I'd seen was a simple bamboo blind, yellowed with age, and painted on it was the outline of a dragon, and the dragon's eye was a dot of gold. That was what had led me all this way. ~ Alan Spence

There are times when I wish I could go back and change the course of my life. Make different choices ... But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on. Do you remember that I told you that at Spence? ~ Libba Bray

My definition of success: When your core values and self-concept are in harmony with your daily actions and behaviors. ~ John Spence

And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter. ~ Lewis Spence

All that you achieve and all that you fail to achieve are the direct results of your thoughts. ~ John Spence

I had only two offers of marriage in my life, and I refused both. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

Habits, good or bad, can always be traced back to your own thinking. ~ John Spence

Words that do not create images should be discarded. ~ Gerry Spence

I was not thinking about infinite multipliers when I was 10. But I did have a father who was a Ph.D. in commerce and finance and an intellectual man. And so I had a feeling, probably about the time I went to college, that I would try to be a scholar and teacher, but I didn't know which field. ~ Michael Spence

Roll the Dice and Watch Them Come Up Snake Eyes Eve ~ Jackson Spence

Love is not about sex, going on fancy dates, or showing off. It's about being with a person who makes you happy in a way nobody else can. ~ John Spence

The minute you stop expecting life to be simple, fair and easy ... it becomes simple, fair and easy. ~ John Spence

Your Day Is Your Life ~ John Spence

The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.' ~ Ben Bernanke

Remember: everyone you meet is fighting a mighty battle. Be kind. Be understanding. ~ John Spence

The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny. ~ Gerry Spence

There is no other place where you can go and basically say, "I need help with this area of my life" and someone will respond, "All right, let's figure this out". ~ Annie Spence

We die, he said.
We die, I said. And kn owing this how do we live?
Knowing this, we live.
We live. ~ Alan Spence

We are afraid. But fear confirms life and identifies the source of every successful argument - ourselves. ~ Gerry Spence

This brings me to the question of the antiquity of the belief in fairies and to the associated problem of the existence of strata or stages in fairy belief. The antiquity of the belief is revealed by the wide distribution of tales concerning fairies, while it is also indicated by the antipathy of the elves to iron and salt - ancient taboos both. Not only so, but many traits respecting fairies, especially shape-shifting and the belief in their semi-corporeal state, are eloquent of primitive notions. That the process of the fairy belief witnessed more than one stage of development in the course of successive ages appears more than probable. 'The fairies of one race,' remarks Wentz, 'are the people of the preceding race.' If this statement lacks a certain precision, one realizes the implication; that is, that the ghosts or gods of a preceding race may come to be regarded by their successors as fairies. ~ Lewis Spence

If Spence had really wanted to bed Miss Nordstrum, he would have said how she'd been in his mind since the moment he arrived in Reederville. He'd have added that her visits to Amanda after the baby's birth had given him hope that she might have come in part to see him.
And he would have ended by assuring her that when he agreed to go riding with her today it hadn't been with the intention of kissing her, but
her beauty had stolen his senses away and he couldn't resist her
charms. He wouldn't have fucked her that afternoon, but sometime within a month, he could've seduced her into bed.
Spence was a master at weaving a spell of words to charm a woman
into doing what he wanted. Hadn't he proven that with Amanda? Amanda, who wouldn't leave his head, day or night.
Amanda, the most colossal mistake of his life. ~ Bonnie Dee

I should add, however, that, particularly on the occasion of Samhain, bonfires were lit with the express intention of scaring away the demonic forces of winter, and we know that, at Bealltainn in Scotland, offerings of baked custard were made within the last hundred and seventy years to the eponymous spirits of wild animals which were particularly prone to prey upon the flocks - the eagle, the crow, and the fox, among others. Indeed, at these seasons all supernatural beings were held in peculiar dread. It seems by no means improbable that these circumstances reveal conditions arising out of a later solar pagan worship in respect of which the cult of fairy was relatively greatly more ancient, and perhaps held to be somewhat inimical. ~ Lewis Spence

Some evidence seems to exist that an idea prevailed that in the fairy sphere there is a reversal of the seasons, our winter being their summer. Some such belief seems to have been known to Robert Kirk, for he tells us that 'when we have plenty they [the fairies] have scarcity at their homes.' In respect of the Irish fairies they seem to have changed their residences twice a year: in May, when the ancient Irish "flitted" from their winter houses to summer pastures, and in November, when they quitted these temporary quarters. ~ Lewis Spence

In the secret island the Druid shall dwell once more, and the Bard, the slave of the harp, utter the speech of the Gods. ~ Lewis Spence

Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery. ~ Gerry Spence

Be happy. Be yourself. If others don't like it, then let them be. Happiness is a choice. Life isn't about pleasing everybody. ~ John Spence

Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts - tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty. ~ Jonathan D. Spence

I love my life and I am so blessed. ~ Gerry Spence

There are no rules that say lawyers cannot write or speak from their heart. Passion has never been formally outlawed, although it is a little-known experience among most lawyers and nearly all academicians. ~ Gerry Spence

What you do today determines who you will be tomorrow. ~ John Spence

If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past. If you lie, it becomes a part of your future. ~ John Spence

He waited a few more seconds, hoping her tight jaw would unclench and she'd ask him to stay, but she sat staring down the empty track.
There was nothing for him to do but walk away. The drum of his boot heels as he left Amanda and Lydia behind sounded like the clang of the
door slamming shut on his prison cell in Lexington. Each step away from
them felt like a year added to his sentence.
Spence only walked about a hundred yards before he stopped. His chest ached so much he could hardly draw breath. He couldn't do this.
He looked back over his shoulder at Amanda sitting on the bench. She held Lydia on her lap facing her, resting against her arms and looking up into her face. They were involved in an intimate, one-sided conversation.
He stood and stared. He couldn't leave them, but Amanda had made it clear she didn't want him. God, he would give anything if he could go
back and change the way they'd met. But how could he have done things
differently and still have met Amanda? If he hadn't pretended to be Travis Baxter that day at the station, she never would've spoken to him at all. Spence couldn't regret what he'd done nor could he condone it. It was a double-edged sword. ~ Bonnie Dee

What kind of name is Siler-Spence? I mean, what's wrong with these women who use hyphens? What if her name was Skowinski and she married a guy named Levondowski? Would her little liberated soul insist she go through life as F.Gwendolin Skowinski- Levondowski? ~ John Grisham

Wilton Spencer," she said softly, "why do you have to be so damned smart?"
Spence smiled. "Darned smart," he said; then he wiped her tears away and kissed her on the tip of her nose. ~ Jackie French Koller

You are the average of your five closest associates. ~ John Spence

Globalization is the process by which markets integrate worldwide. ~ Michael Spence

In all likelihood fairies of larger stature were ancient gods in a state of decay, while their diminutive congeners were the swarming spirits of primitive imagination. ~ Lewis Spence

In my view the study of fairy origins assumes a greater degree of importance than popular opinion is wont to concede to it. Indeed, the ideas associated with it strike at the very roots of human belief and primitive methods of reasoning. It is scarcely to be questioned that the explanation of fairy origins is of the utmost value to the better comprehension of primitive religion. Later it will be made clear that, for the writer at least, the whole tradition of Faerie reveals quite numerous and excellent proofs of its former existence as a primitive and separate cult and faith, more particularly as regards its appearance and tradition in these islands. ~ Lewis Spence

Riding a bull must be a bit like flying an ultralight. You get up there and have an exhilarating ride, but then you still have to get down. ~ Susan Spence

Our willingness to openly reveal our feelings in our argument nearly always builds our credibility. ~ Gerry Spence

Those ties...those ties are forever, and I never wanted to be connected to any other person so permanently. Forever was always meant for you and me, Spence. ~ Heather M. Orgeron

Everyone wants to argue. Everyone does. Everyone needs to. ~ Gerry Spence

I know love is worth the time it takes to find. Think of that when all the world seems made of walk up rooms and hands in empty pockets ~ Gerry Spence

Being alone does not mean you are lonely, and being lonely does not mean you are alone. ~ John Spence

Hours of research can cut months of field work. ~ E. Lee Spence

They don't know what they're in for at Spence, getting me, a ghost of a girl who'll nod and smile and take her tea but who isn't really here. ~ Libba Bray

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes ~ Isaac Barrow

Drinking habits were very prevalent among men, and were not in any way disgraceful, unless excessive. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

Gazing into his eyes, I was lost in their intensity. It was like looking into the bluest sky and carrying on to infinity. I felt mesmerised, hypnotised and transfixed all at once. ~ Pat Spence - Blue Moon

The old saw that "sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me" does not, in fact, hold true. ~ Gerry Spence

Don't think of cost. Think of value. ~ John Spence

The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity. ~ Gerry Spence

Isaiah's name. The name borne by this great prophet was really Yesha'-yahu, which signifies "the Salvation of Jehovah." The ~ Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones

For the next hour, Joanne clung to Spence's back, comfortable now with the enforced physical intimacy, loving the wind on her face, the swoops and dizzying corners , the way other bikers saluted as if she and Spence belonged, with them, to a select club. ~ Bobby Hutchinson

My return to London introduced me to a wider range of society. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not. ~ Gerry Spence

The more you appreciate, the more you have to appreciate. ~ Carma Spence

When you have to start compromising yourself and your morals for the people around you, it's probably time to change the people around you. ~ John Spence

People do what seems easy and convenient, not what is best for them. ~ John Spence

Making a hundred friends is not a miracle. The miracle is to make a single friend who will stand by your side even when hundreds are against you. ~ John Spence

invest simultaneously in the agricultural sector, in education, in productivity-enhancing technology and its dissemination, and in infrastructure that enables connectivity to the rest of the economy. ~ Michael Spence

There is nothing so costly to the state as a ruined life ~ Catherine Helen Spence

What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies. ~ Gerry Spence

My brothers went to the parish school, one of the best in the county. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry's perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country. ~ Vincent Bugliosi

After the break up of the municipality and the loss of his income my father lost health and spirits. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

I want you, Spence, but I can't have you. I won't allow it. You're too good, too pure, too innocent. And just as your presence soothes me, mine will eventually flaw you. It's inevitable, and I care too much for you to let that happen. ~ L.B. Simmons

The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them. ~ Gerry Spence

Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as" the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company o ~ Lewis Spence

Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong. ~ Gerry Spence

Forgive yourself first. Let go of past hurts and direct your spirit to goodness and hope by having gratitude. ~ Janet Taylor Spence

I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process. ~ Gerry Spence

SPENCE, THAT DOUR, IMPOSING LADY EAST OF LONDON, has grown a friendly face in my absence. I've never been so happy to see a place in all my sixteen years. Even the gargoyles have lost their fierceness. They are like wayward pets who haven't the sense to come in from the roof and so we let them live there, glaring but cheerful. ~ Libba Bray

If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know. ~ Jonathan D. Spence

The art of arguing is the art of living. We argue because we must, because life emends it, because, in the end, life itself is but an argument. ~ Gerry Spence

The way people move
is their autobiography in motion. ~ Gerry Spence

The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, "Are we free?" I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer? ~ Gerry Spence

Quite a number of writers comment on the decidedly human character of the fairies, but it must be obvious that practically all supernaturals partake of human traits, more usually unpleasant ones, being as they are the projections of man's fear and imagination and created by him, psychologically, in his own image. Fairies are frequently described as being peevish, irritable, and revengeful to a degree. Grant Stewart says rather unmercifully of the Scottish fairies that their appetites are as keen as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked. ~ Lewis Spence

Maybe the most dangerous thing about the "Illuminati" isn't that such a master cabal has ever existed, but that some people believe it should and wreak havoc under the delusion they run the world. ~ Richard B. Spence

Emily, there are enemies everywhere. We have to be on our guard, especially for the next couple of weeks.' Theo sighed unhappily. 'This is going to be the longest fortnight of my life.' 'That's saying something,' I joked, 'given how long you've lived.' 'Exactly,' he said, without smiling. ~ Pat Spence