Acti Quotes & Sayings

The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don't, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won't be seen as being original, somehow. — Jim Jarmusch

Firefly: Now that you're Secretary of War, what kind of an army do you think we oughta have? Chicolini: Well, I tell you what I think. I think we should have a standing army. Firefly: Why should we have a standing army? Chicolini: Because then we save money on chairs. — Groucho Marx

I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.(IAGO,ActI,SceneI) — William Shakespeare

There's a bar like it in every town. It's dimly-lit and the drinkers, although they talk, don't address their words to one another and they don't listen, either. They just talk the hurt inside. It's a bar for the derelict and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged off the racetrack of life and into the pits.
It always does a brisk trade.
On this dawn the mourners sat ranged along the counter, each in his cloud of gloom, each certain that he was the most unfortunate individual in the whole world. — Terry Pratchett

Every economic ... acti on must set about providing each inhabitant of the planet with the minimum wherewithal to live in dignity and freedom, with the possibility of supporting a family, educating children, praising God and developing one's own human potential. — Pope Francis

To cherish others is to cherish ourselves. To cherish ourselves is to cherish others. And in that same way, we relate to the truth. If we support it, if we embrace it, if we uphold it, we will be embraced by it, we will be supported and upheld by it. — Sharon Salzberg

Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground. — Christina Rossetti

Lots of folks have a hard life. It's an excuse for failure, not a reason. Life is what you make of it." These — Roger W. Buenger

Surely they must have spent years hand in hand together - alone the two of them, casting off all the world and each uniting his or her life with the other's? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I wish I could describe what it feels like to have thousands of people listening to your every word, how easy it is to please them, to get that applause and to hear them out there screaming for you. It's like being in control of one big ocean and you can calm it down or make it roar. — Fannie Flagg

I cannot hold a grudge against Mariah Carey. What people don't understand is that I've looked up to her for so many years. — Nicki Minaj

We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much. — James Hilton

Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity. — Edmund Bergler

I've never been bashful to say that I'm not really interested in Formula One. When I lived in England, it's all I wanted to do and I thought that anything else would somehow be a compromise to my dreams. But then when I came back to the States, I realised how much I loved being back in the States. — Danica Patrick

There is another point, which I would much rather see determined; whether the world was always as contemptible, as it appears to me at present? - If the morals of mankind have not contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity, within these thirty years, then must I be infected with the common vice of old men, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti;14 or, which is more probable, the impetuous pursuits and avocations of youth have formerly hindered me from observing those rotten parts of human nature, which now appear so offensively to my observation. — Tobias Smollett