Coterie Quotes & Sayings

The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses ... This little coterie ... runs our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen ... seizes ... our executive officers ... legislative bodies ... schools ... courts ... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. — John Francis Hylan

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati
those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues. — Edward Abbey

Parks is amazed. Appalled. Even a little bit disgusted. He's used to dealing with people who have at least some sort of survival instinct, and he knows that Justineau isn't stupid. Back at the base, he thought of her as the best of Caldwell's exasperating little coterie, and while that isn't saying much, he actually liked and respected her. He still does. But — M.R. Carey

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. — John Kennedy Toole

It was the gravity of the place. In football the facility was designed to be difficult to leave. Everything was there for you. A barber came in regularly. So did a dry cleaner and a car washer. Three meals a day were served. And best of all, there was the built-in coterie of brothers and fathers and uncles and a mutual sense of binding purpose. — Nicholas Dawidoff

I'm fortunate I have this coterie of musicians around me to help take music to next level. Being surrounded by so much creative energy, so many creative people really feeds that creativity in me. — Duncan Sheik

There are two kinds of designers: ones who are very happy locked in their office surrounded by their coterie. The last thing they need to do is to go to a trunk show; they'd go running for the hills. I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it? — Michael Kors

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings. — Edward Hirsch

It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable - his "Orphic Sayings" - for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages. — Megan Marshall

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better. — Ellen Glasgow

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture. — Dana Gioia

I separated myself in Prada because I didn't want to have fun. They were all having a lot of fun - Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci - and they were a little coterie of laughs. — Meryl Streep

Dictators, unlike Democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown. — Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood - to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today's modern, globalized megalopolises. — Charles C. Mann

In her own special, provocative language, Tonya Bolden gives a voice to the voiceless, a name to the nameless. Revelations abound in Strong Men Keep Coming, her singular take on the endless parade of black men who have fought, sung, cajoled, tricked, worked, wrote, or roped their way into the American experience . She has assembled a most rewarding cast, a phenomenal coterie of role models and phantoms, and she has done a splendid job of telling their stories. — Herb Boyd

Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable. — Bertrand Russell

Syria should not belong to one family, to one coterie, or to one party. It belongs to all the people of Syria equally, in all their religious and ethnic diversity. — William Hague

The Kennedy assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one over-ridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom those others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past. — L. Fletcher Prouty

Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the 'Cause' is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. — C.S. Lewis

A good, finished scandal, fully armed and equipped, such as circulates in the world, is rarely the production of a single individual, or even of a single coterie. It sees the light in one; is rocked and nurtured in another; is petted, developed, and attains its growth in a third; and receives its finishing touches only after passing through a multitude of hands. It is a child that can count a host of fathers
all ready to disown it. — Sophie Swetchine

A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage. — Mohsin Hamid

The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed. — Gary Weiss

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is
excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. — Ray Bradbury

For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city. — Honore De Balzac

A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage. This, I reasoned, was why America felt justified in bringing so many deaths to Afghanistan and Iraq, and why America felt justified in risking so many more deaths by tacitly using India to pressure Pakistan. — Mohsin Hamid