Bottom To The Top Quotes & Sayings

The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence
the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required. — C. G. Jung

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes. — CrimethInc.

Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life. — Milton Friedman

There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation. — Adam Braun

We describe the decision-making time like being stuck at the top of a high mountain; there are two ways down, one was to jump off the steep side and the other was to roll down the rocky side. In both cases, we knew we might not be alive by the time we got to the bottom. There is no easy or less painful choice, really. - A dad — Stephanie Azri

The sermon which does not lead to Christ, or of which Jesus Christ is not the top and the bottom, is a sort of sermon that will make the devils in hell laugh, but make the angels of God weep. — Charles Spurgeon

Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. — Frans De Waal

seen Sitterson knew what was happening: in the mechanism older than Man, a small metal hammer struck a glass vial, cracking it from top to bottom and releasing the blood retained inside. The blood ran into a brass funnel that extended into a long, long pipe, running even deeper through rock and dark spaces, emerging eventually into a place deeper still. Here, the — Tim Lebbon

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. — Will Rogers

Remember my experiments with the RTG and having a hot bath? Same principle, but I came up with an improvement: submerge the RTG. No heat will be wasted that way. I started with a large rigid sample container (or "plastic box" to people who don't work at NASA). I ran a tube through the open top and down the inside wall. Then I coiled it in the bottom to make a spiral. I glued it in place like that and sealed the end. Using my smallest drill bit, I put dozens of little holes in the coil. The idea is for the freezing return air from the regulator to pass through the water as a bunch of little bubbles. The increased surface area will get the heat into the air better. Then I got a medium flexible sample container ("Ziploc bag") and tried to seal the RTG in it. But the RTG has an irregular shape, and I couldn't get all the air out of the bag. I can't allow any air in there. — Andy Weir

America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top. — Charlie King

The businesses that thrive over the long haul are likely to be those that understand that cost cutting and revenue growing aren't mutually exclusive. Eternal vigilance to both the top and bottom lines is the new ticket to prosperity. — Howard Schultz

Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow. — Marya Hornbacher

Oppenheimer's agony tore him open from top to bottom. More important than any political dispute his biographers may hope to re-animate or even to settle is a sense of that agony: what it means to be a man desiring scientific and political and moral greatness and living out the crucial ideas and struggles of our time, which pierce like knives, and rend the flesh and the spirit, and allow not a moment's relief. — Algis Valiunas

Our goal should be to make decision makers internalize the full consequences of their decisions, rather than prevent them from making decisions altogether [...] But we tend to reform under the delusion that the regulated institutions and the markets they operate in are static and passive, and that the regulatory environment will not vary with the cycle. Ironically, faith in draconian regulation is strongest at the bottom of the cycle, when there is little need for participants to be regulated. By contrast, the misconception that markets will govern themselves is most widespread at the top of the cycle, at the point of maximum danger to the system. We need to acknowledge these differences and enact cycle-proof regulation, for a regulation set against the cycle will not stand. To have a better chance of creating stability throughout the cycle--of being cycle-proof--new regulations should be comprehensive, nondiscretionary, contingent, and cost-effective. — Raghuram G. Rajan

We need to do a top/bottom review of the federal government and for every agency administration bureaucracy that is not called for in the United States Constitution, we have to really ask the question what is its purpose, how many people work there, how much does it cost the taxpayers and what is the value to our society. — Josh Mandel

Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated distrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom. — C. G. Jung

An across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes ... to expand the incentives and opportunities of private expenditures. — John F. Kennedy

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people. — Eduardo Galeano

We must limit the running to and fro which most men practise, rambling about houses, theatres, and marketplaces. They mind other men's business, and always seem as though they themselves had something to do. If you ask one of them as he comes out of his own door, "Whither are you going?" he will answer, "By Hercules, I do not know: but I shall see some people and do something." They wander purposelessly seeking for something to do, and do, not what they have made up their minds to do, but what has casually fallen in their way. They move uselessly and without any plan, just like ants crawling over bushes, which creep up to the top and then down to the bottom again without gaining anything. Many men spend their lives in exactly the same fashion, which one may call a state of restless indolence. — Seneca.

Being that I went to jail and came back, I went through a whole new experience in life. I went from being at the top to back down at the bottom again. In jail, you get stripped of your freedom and everything, so I experienced different things, learned more. — Meek Mill

I have a little tradition that humbles me as a man that lets me know I'm a part of the field and a part of the game, and it's the very bottom as well as the very top. Yeah, it's going to be all over the internet. You know what? You should've seen some games before this. I'll tell you one thing, the grass at Tiger Stadium tastes best. — Les Miles

The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system. — Milton Friedman

[Note: Brahma originally had five heads. He and Vishnu were once contesting each other's superiority. Just then a huge column of light appeared in front of them and they wondered what it was. They agreed that he who found either end of the column earlier would be the greater of the two. Vishnu became a boar and sought the bottom; Brahma became a swan and flew up towards the top. Vishnu returned disappointed. Brahma at the point of despair came across a falling screwpine flower. He stopped its descent and asked from where it was coming. All that it knew was that it was falling from space and nothing more. Brahma persuaded it to bear false witness and claimed superiority over his rival. Siva was enraged, snipped off that head which spoke the lie, and declared himself as the column of light.] — Sri Dattatreya

Extreme intelligence is accused of being as foolish as extreme lack of it; only moderation is good. The majority have laid this down and attack anyone who deviates from it towards any extreme whatever. I am not going to be awkward, I readily consent to being put in the middle and refuse to be at the bottom end, not because it is the bottom but because it is the end, for I should refuse just as much to be put at the top. It is deserting humanity to desert the middle way.
The greatness of the human soul lies in knowing how to keep this course; greatness does not mean going outside it, but rather keeping within it. — Blaise Pascal

People make the mistake of assuming far too many things about armies,' Lefevre told me one evening. 'They assume, for a start, that generals know what they are doing and know what is going on. They assume that orders pass down from top to bottom in a smooth and regulated fashion. And above all they assume that wars start only when people decide to start them.' 'You are going to tell me that is not the case?' 'Wars begin when they are ready, when humanity needs a bloodletting. Kings and politicians and generals have little say in it. You can feel it in the air when one is brewing. There is a tension and nervousness on the face of the least soldier. They can smell it coming in a way politicians cannot. The desire to hurt and destroy spreads over a region and over the troops. And then the generals can only hope to have the vaguest notion of what they are doing. — Iain Pears

The quickest way to the top, is getting off your bottom — Benny Bellamacina

It sounds really spiritual to say God is interested in a relationship, not in rules. But it's not biblical. From top to bottom, the Bible is full of commands. They aren't meant to stifle a relationship with God, but to protect it, seal it, and define it. Never forget: first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then He gave them the law. God's people were not redeemed by observing the law. But they were redeemed so that they might obey the law. — Kevin DeYoung

It's really the creature of my own making from top to bottom. I appreciate that. And the good fortune, the perseverance, having the stamina to stick around longer than everyone else even after people write you off - that's always been a good motivating force in my life. — Ariel Pink

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.
As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky. — Mitch Albom

The skull sat on top of an old Stop sign. Someone had painted the surface of the octagon white and written KEEP OUT across it in large jagged letters. A reddish-brown splatter stained the bottom edge, looking suspiciously like dried blood. I leaned closer. Yep, blood. Some hair, too. Human hair.
Curran frowned at the sign. "Do you think he's trying to tell us something?"
"I don't know. He's being so subtle about it. — Ilona Andrews

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?
Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?
It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. — James Joyce

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top. — Malcolm Gladwell

They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth
and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. — T.H. White

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now. — Allan Massie

How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom — Jodi Picoult

All you need to know about Antarctica is it's three horizontal stripes. On the bottom, there's the stripe for the water, which is anywhere from black to dark gray. And on top of that, there's a stripe for the land, which is usually black or white. Then there's a stripe for the sky, which is some kind of gray or blue. — Maria Semple

In some ways, my mother was right; a tree does look the same from the top as it does from the bottom: same branches, starting as weighty limbs and narrowing to the tiniest twigs; same leaves, quivering in the slightest breeze or in the rush of the trains; same colors, same rustling, same gentle sway. But from earth, looking up, a tree is hopeful; it might be touching the sky. From above, looking down, you can see
it's stuck in the dust, just like us. — Elissa Janine Hoole

Regard your team as a family. Give the same attention to the bottom guy as you do the top guy. You have a responsibility to all of your players. — Pete Newell

The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country - from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie. — Upton Sinclair

The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line. — Louis Sullivan

I don't know what else I would do. I love entertaining people, I love communicating, I love an audience. I'm a real artist, right from the bottom of my toes to the top of my head. — Suzi Quatro

A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs another Christ to die for it. — Henry Ward Beecher

What draws me to the type of snowboarding that I'm doing now is, I go through every emotion in life when I'm climbing these mountains. The fear. The anticipation before that. Getting to the top and the joy of standing on top, and then the adrenaline on going down, and then the kind of overwhelming emotions that I get at the bottom. That whole process is really addicting, and makes me feel alive. — Jeremy Jones

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent. — Sendhil Mullainathan

Being on top of the world doesn't mean anything unless you know what it's like to be at the bottom. — Rachel Smith

I believe our society has fell into a pyramid system where there's people relegated to the bottom of that pyramid and there's people that feel like they're entitled to the top of that pyramid. — Ice Cube

A kingdom needs tending, just like a cheese. Leave a cheese too long and the whey settles to the bottom and sours the whole. Leave a kingdom for too long and others rise to the top and take the whole. — Jackie French

Ingredients 2 packages blueberry gelatin 1 small clean glass fishbowl ½ cup blueberries ½ cup grapes 1 package gummy fish 1 package gummy sharks 1 package gummy flowers 1 package gummy worms 1 thick pretzel rod 1 package red string licorice Directions 1. In a bowl, prepare gelatin according to directions on package. 2. Refrigerate for one hour. 3. While the Jell-O is gelling, add blueberries and grapes to bottom of fishbowl; these are the rocks on the bottom. 4. While it is still soft, spoon the gelatin over the fruit; this is the water. 5. Push the gummy fish, sharks, and flowers into the gelatin. 6. Place in refrigerator; serve cold. 7. To make a fishing pole, tie some red string licorice to a gummy worm, place a pretzel rod on top of the fishbowl, and attach the red string licorice to it. — Sharon M. Draper

We are not at the pinnacle of our power, of our existence. We have scrambled to the top of an ant-hill at the bottom of the world's highest mountain. We have long way still to climb." - The Blue Mountain — G.R. Matthews

Top-half students may use the Groom Room. Bottom-half students should use the time to reflect upon their mediocrity! — Soman Chainani

It is impossible for the nation to develop unless states develop, the process of policy planning also has to change from 'top to bottom' to 'bottom to top — Narendra Modi

When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. I — J.M. Barrie

Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.
At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everybody was watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him in her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say she had made him, although something odd must have gone into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn't nail him down, other cheeses as well. — Terry Pratchett

[E]lections amount to little more than choosing between the scum that floats to the top of the barrel and the dregs that settle to the bottom. — L. Neil Smith

Shut your eyes so the heart may become your eye, and with that vision look upon another world. If you can step away from your need for self-approval, all that you do, top to bottom, will be approved. — Rumi

Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. — Peter M. Senge

The stinging insects clung to one another and floated in clumps the size of basketballs, the ants on bottom giving their lives to save those on top. They — Judith Richards

It is easy to get to the top after you get through the crowd at the bottom. — Zig Ziglar

Leo went to work with his pliers, reprogramming the signs until the top one flashed: THE DOCTOR IS: IN DA HOUSE. The bottom sign changed to read: NOW SERVING: ALL DA LADIES LUV LEO! — Rick Riordan

I wanted everything for him. I wanted to see him achieve every dream, embrace every desire. I wanted to protect him from anyone who would cause him harm or a moments pain, tear them apart with my bare hands. Never let him out of my sight, even as I wanted him to stretch out his wings as far as they could go and soar. And at the bottom, top and middle of it all, I just wanted to stand there, just that way forever. Not disturb him. Just look at him and love him. Do nothing but simply love him for everything he is, a creation too perfect to be anything but God's gift to the rest of us. — Joey W. Hill

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top — Boethius

You know, sometimes the little victories that I have throughout the season are not necessarily obvious on the track. Maybe they're another aspect of what I'm doing, winning little victories here and there to get everything in line to be able to perform from top to bottom on race day. — Danica Patrick

The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrence to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system, and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963. — John F. Kennedy

In my 20 years in football, I was fortunate enough never to have experienced relegation. And while there is the pressure of expectations at the top of the league, at the bottom it comes in fear and trepidation, which is almost worse. — Gary Neville

The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom. — Jeff Sharlet

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. — Jennifer Egan

top-to-bottom" change) (Fig.10-75). There may or may not be a thin layer of keratin on the surface. The epithelium may be hyperplastic or atrophic. Some authorities consider this entity to be a precancerous — Anonymous

He's on his knees.
I bite back the moan caught in my throat just before he lifts me up and carries me to the bed. He's on top of me in an instant, kissing me with a kind of intensity that makes me wonder why I haven't died or caught on fire or woken up from this dream yet. He's running his hands down my body only to bring them back up to my face and he kisses me once, twice, and his teeth catch my bottom lip for just a second and I'm clinging to him, wrapping my arms around his neck and running my hands through his hair and pulling him into me.
He tastes so sweet. So hot and so sweet and I keep trying to say his name but I can't even find the time to breathe, much less to say a single word. — Tahereh Mafi

Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories "prove" that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate. — Michelle Alexander

I never thought that I'd be considered to have a good body. I was bony up top and kind of dumpy on the bottom. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.
There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from. — Peter Carey

From time to time you'll see documentaries about low-ranked wolves who somehow rise to the top of the pack - an omega that earns a position as an alpha. Frankly, I don't buy it. I think that, in actuality, those documentary makers have misidentified the wolf in the first place. For example, an alpha personality, to the man on the street, is usually considered bold and take-charge and forceful. In the wolf world, though that describes the beta rank. Likewise, an omega wolf - a bottom-ranking, timid, nervous animal - can often be confused with a wolf who hangs behind the others, wary, protecting himself, trying to figure out the Big Picture.
Or in other words: There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really an alpha all along. — Jodi Picoult

Rock bottom demands we pay a price for the ride back to the top. — Toni Sorenson

Instead of working hard to keep their share of a shrinking pie, or working even harder to make sure the industry stays as is, I think the most essential thing legacy book industry players can do is set up independent ventures with great people and little interference and work really hard to put themselves out of business by starting at the bottom, not by reinforcing the top. — Seth Godin

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. — Salman Rushdie

I live completely without regret. Sure there are plenty of things that someone could second guess, but I see the path of life like driving down the road without a map. The thing is, some dark alleys open up in majestic places, and some bright and shiny highways to the top end in cliffs to the bottom. You never know until you get there. What I know for sure is that if many years ago I actually had a map to the path of life, the destination that I would have chosen is right here, with this family, in this place, and with these smiles. That makes anything that could have been regretful, the best decision in the world. — Michael A. Wood Jr.

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom. — Evelyn Waugh

To solicit the aid of luck is like stirring muddy water to bring objects submerged at the bottom to the top where they can be seen. Every worker would to well to tempt their good luck. Nevertheless, we should not depend on it too much. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Don't try to make yourself marketable, you'll be surprised to see yourself at the bottom. Stay incognito, and people will peruse the whole world looking for you, by that time, you'll be at the top. — Michael Bassey Johnson

For several months, there had been nothing discussed at the Opera but this ghost in dress-clothes who stalked about the building, from top to bottom, — Gaston Leroux

Salaries haven't kept up with inflation, and there is such anger coming out of Washington about immigrants that I think it has curtailed the ability of local folks here to hire immigrants, .. I really believe it starts from the top, and the policy continues to be one of ignoring people at the bottom, cutting taxes for those on the top and spending a lot of money for a war built on lies. — Jose Serrano

Cause everything I've done - there's no smokescreen. Everything the people have seen me do, they've literally seen me start from the bottom and rise to the top. So there is no falling down once you've done the stuff I've done. — Riff Raff

Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few. — Marian Wright Edelman

There is a responsibility on all companies to look at the quantum of pay and the relationship between the top and the bottom. — Stuart Rose

The surest way to find an actively managed fund that will have top-quartile returns is to look for a fund that has bottom-quartile expenses. — Burton Malkiel

The awful consciousness that one is the sole object of attention to that immense space, lined as it were with human intellect from top to bottom, and on all side round, may be perhaps be imagined but can not be described. — Sarah Siddons

We sometimes hurt those we love because they need to be "taught a lesson," when we really want to punish. We were depressed and complained we felt bad, when in fact we were mainly asking for sympathy and attention. This odd trait of mind and emotion, this perverse wish to hide a bad motive underneath a good one, permeates human affairs from top to bottom. This subtle and elusive kind of self-righteousness can underlie the smallest act or thought. Learning daily to spot, admit, and correct these flaws is the essence of character-building and good living. An honest regret for harms done, a genuine gratitude for blessings received, and a willingness to try for better things tomorrow will be the permanent assets we shall seek. — Alcoholics Anonymous

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid's oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out. — Desmond Tutu

I say we scrap the current system and replace it with a system wherein you add your name to the bottom of a list, and then you send some money to the person at the top of the list, and then you ... Oh, wait, that is our current system. — Dave Barry

On tight money: It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom - the old trickle-down theory. — Harry S. Truman

This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite - it should look inside of us. When I put them in the middle of the room, I attach the paintings at the top to the ceiling and on the bottom to the floor. I prefer this to just hanging them from the ceiling because it creates a place in a space, like a wall. — Pierre Soulages

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. — David Graeber

Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. — Hans Christian Andersen

Years ago, when I was (at Stanford), you had maybe one or two teams
at one time I was part of one of those teams
you didn't have to worry about, ... Now it's not that way in the conference. A lot of the teams that were once at the bottom kind of have their games together and are making their way to the top. — Tyrone Willingham

They call me Ricky Fatton. Mind you I've had a lot on my plate recently. I got measured for this suit the other week. They measured my pants, jacket, top to bottom. Bloody hell Ricky you're a Mark F they said, a size up from a marquee. — Ricky Hatton

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream. — Bill Moyers

This kind of inequality - a level we haven't seen since the Great Depression - hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity - that's why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It's also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run. — Barack Obama

Spare me. You don't kiss period. But look at you. My, my, my. Aside from your bashed up face, you're glowing. I haven't seen you look happy in years." Taddy studied her from top to bottom. "He slammed your pussy, didn't he?" Taddy gunned for an answer. "The longtime Miss Prudence of Prudeville, my frigid friend, the "Big Apple
Starved for Sex" got her McIntosh plucked. Or should I say fucked and made into apple sauce. — Avery Aster