Hordes Quotes & Sayings

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979) — Jack McClelland

I do know enough about economics and so do you to understand that the 'stimulus program' of Barack Obama and his ravenous parasitic hordes, supposedly designed to 'repair' America's broken economy, reveals him to be unimaginably stupid, gibberingly insane, or simply the biggest, most barefaced criminal thug ever to occupy the White House. And that's saying a lot. — L. Neil Smith

I kind of felt like a new kind of princess. A warrior princess, ready to swing her battle-ax through hordes of the fashion-challenged and the socially unfortunate. — Rachel Vincent

He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet's cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore. — Ben Bova

The Hebrews knew that by rest, God meant not only the protection of their boundaries from invading hordes but the emotional, mental, and spiritual confidence they would have knowing that God was irreversibly with them. Rest was inseparable from God's presence. One always accompanies the other. — Will Davis Jr.

Except that wasn't all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field, dropping in someone's yard, on a tree or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I'd read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner has his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn't a rule. That was a custom. — Khaled Hosseini

Any kind of dictatorship, I'm uneasy. I just don't like dictators. I don't like crowds. I don't like hordes, and I don't like other people telling me what to do. This is probably a reaction against people telling me what to do when I was a kid. I won't join any group, espouse a cause against some other people. — Frank Capra

What dreadful misfortune awaited them among the savage hordes intoxicated with blood? — Henryk Sienkiewicz

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. — Boris Pasternak

I moved along ancient streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, Travessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to Salvador took place during a period when the local government, or someone acting in its name, was trying to renew the old city, and was closing down the thousands of brothels. But the project was only at midpoint. At the feet of those deserted and leprous churches embarrassed by their own evil-smelling alleys, fifteen-year-old black prostitutes still swarmed, ancient women selling African sweets crouched along the sidewalks with their steaming pots, and hordes of pimps danced amid trickles of sewage to the sound of transistor radios in nearby bars. The ancient palaces of the Portuguese settlers, surmounted by coats of arms now illegible, had become houses of ill-repute. — Umberto Eco

The best evidence that time travel is impossible is the fact that we haven't been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future. — Guillaume Musso

mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking. — Steven Pinker

Time to beat back the bunny hordes," he said gallantly,knowing that any blood-hungry animals in the area would be waiting outside for me.
He threw open the door, shouting, "Bunnies, prepare to meet your doom! — Delilah S. Dawson

Living in Venice, it's hard to determine the real parody of inhumanity. On the one hand, there are the homeless hordes, a teaming mass of virtual zombies swelling the streets whose daily business amounts to ruffling through trash, pissing on corners and chasing pets. On the other hand, there is the endless stream of bourgeois stiffs coming and going from home, restaurants and shops. They are zombies in their own right who pretend the homeless don't exist. — Ryan Hyatt

Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low-income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. Perhaps most importantly, there is an absence of hope. In these countries, the poor know that their prospects of emerging from poverty, let along making it to the top, are minuscule. This is not something we should be striving for. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads. — David Bowie

Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions ... Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden. — Margaret Sanger

Tonight the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come marched in goose-step and raised a hand to salute "Heil Hitler!" Tonight the ghost wore a swastika on his armband instead of the simple red and white colors of Austria. And yet, on this silent night, the horrible specter seemed all but invisible in Vienna. Murphy could only wonder if he was the sole person at Sacher's who could hear the anthem of Hitler's hordes echoing distantly from beyond the mountains. — Bodie Thoene

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed. — Paul Di Filippo

The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soidisant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey's books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knightsfriars would have burned many of them as "heretical" according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine? — Sarah Vowell

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges. — Henry George

The analysis of our illustrations has taught us another incidental lesson. This is that, when we study the effects of various proposals, not merely on special groups in the short run, but on all groups in the long run, the conclusions we arrive at usually correspond with those of unsophisticated common sense. It would not occur to anyone unacquainted with the prevailing economic half-literacy that it is good to have windows broken and cities destroyed; that it is anything but waste to create needless public projects; that it is dangerous to let idle hordes of men return to work; that machines which increase the production of wealth and economize human effort are to be dreaded; that obstructions to free production and free consumption increase wealth; that a nation grows richer by forcing other nations to take its goods for less than they cost to produce; that saving is stupid or wicked and that squandering brings prosperity. — Henry Hazlitt

There was corruption at every turn, and those who stood for honesty and integrity were more and more vulnerable, more and more isolated amongst the hordes of people who simply had no moral sense. And — Alexander McCall Smith

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'
pp. 205-206 — Timothy Snyder

Norbert Wiener," Tillingford said. "You recall his work in cybernetics. And, even more important, Enrico Destini's work in the field of theophonics." "What's that?" Tillingford raised an eyebrow. "You are a specialist, my boy. Communication between man and God, of course. Using Wiener's work, and using the invaluable material of Shannon and Weaver, Destini was able to set up the first really adequate system of communication between Earth and Heaven in 1946. Of course, he had the use of all that equipment from the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns." "You mean the - Nazis?" "I'm familiar with that term. That's sociologist jargon, isn't it? And that Denier of the Prophet, that Anti-Bab. They say he's still alive down in Argentina. Found the elixir of eternal youth or something. He made that pact with the devil in 1939, you remember. Or was that before your time? But you know about it - it's history." "I — Philip K. Dick

Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets. Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone
simply possesses the capacity to see a living game going on continually and to live all the time
surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life. — Alice Munro

The Red Army ... swept the native population clean in a manner that has no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes. — George F. Kennan

There are loads of actresses that modelled. They just weren't famous. There weren't a lot that were really known as models that became actresses, but there are hordes of them that did modelling before such as Anjelica Huston, Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and Geena Davis. There are loads of 'em. — Andie MacDowell

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. — Marisha Pessl

There is no such thing as a crazy dog person in New York. Are there people who are completely insane about their dogs? Hordes. But cat people may as well have whiskers and tails themselves. That's because their pets' lack of social need taps straight into our worst fears as the human inhabitants of New York. — Sloane Crosley

And for God's sake, if you need to shoot make sure to release the safety , he murmured, as we moved across the front, careful to stick to the shadows as often as we could. So far, I hadn't seen anyone, not even zombies. It wasn't uncommon for a straggler to come along, every now and then. Lucky for us, we were remote enough that we hadn't had any major issues with any hordes locating us. The men were quick to dispatch any zombies that hung around, not willing to take the risk that somehow they could communicate with each other. Not to mention, the zombies were strong and fast. It was better to end them, rather than to risk them one day killing one of us. — Rose Wynters

'Mulan' holds a very special place in my heart. It's been 16 years since the film, but hordes of fans still come up and tell me how much she means to them. — Ming-Na Wen

The universe is forever falling apart --
No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all the strength, here the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him. — Shinkichi Takahashi

This conference is like a tour through the various levels of Hell, he thought. The only things missing are a respectable Virgil and hordes of people screaming. — Sylvain Reynard

Damn it. Why didn't the United States know when to declare a real war? Those running the country he loved were making a mockery of it. Misusing the word war had become a joke, like The War on Drugs or The War on Women. What was taking place in Guatemala was being run the same way as the fake War on Terror. Similar to Afghanistan, it didn't take long before he realized he was in a no man's land where the dead piled up in silence and the living had nothing to say. Hordes of beggars and gang members roamed the area seeking food, money or young women to rape. Life was cheap. People were killed for a pair of shoes or a handful of pills. — Ava Armstrong

I glanced at Badly Drawn Jesus, then pulled the gun from my pocket. On Judgment Day, I'd be able to proudly state that when I thought the hordes of Hell were coming for a local girl, I stood ready to shoot at them with a small-caliber pistol. — David Wong

Shivaji was the greatest Hindu king that India had produced within the last thousand years; one who was the very incarnation of lord Siva, about whom prophecies were given out long before he was born; and his advent was eagerly expected by all the great souls and saints of Maharashtra as the deliverer of the Hindus from the hands of the Mlecchas, and as one who succeeded in the reestablishment of Dharma which had been trampled underfoot by the depredations of the devastating hordes of the Moghals — Swami Vivekananda

The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: 'Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!' . . . But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary . . . Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of 'Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!' If anybody doesn't want to fight or murder, grab 'em, tear 'em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways. For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

KISS Psycho Circus is my current favorite. I'm not ashamed to say that I prefer the mindless fun of blasting hordes of creatures to exploration or adventure games. — Mike Wilson

Imagine if you can - hordes of asuang, prowling the streets of Tokyo, climbing the Eifel tower, walking up the White House lawn! — Mervin Ignacio

Will you tell me about Genghis Khan's whores while I'm in the bath?" "Hordes, not whores. He had both, though, now that you mention it." "Sounds like he was a busy guy." You have no idea. — Kevin Hearne

Where are you going?" I asked,feeling guilty for not being able to hang out with him.
"To find a faerie to kill me,of course." He winked at us,then pretended to fall straight through when the faerie door opened. Even Arianna laughed as the door closed behind him.
"Where did you find that one?"
"I have no idea.I'm a magnet for crazies, I guess."
"They must be able to sense a kindred spirit."
"You're one to talk.Don't you have more hordes of the undead to lead in a glorious revolution? — Kiersten White

Some people have inspired whole countries to great deeds because of the power of their vision. And so could he. Not because he dreams about marching hordes, or world domination, or an empire of a thousand years. Just because he thinks that everyone's really decent underneath and would get along just fine if only they made the effort, and he believes that so strongly it burns like a flame which is bigger than he is. He's got a dream and we're all part of it, so that it shapes the world around him. And the weird thing is that no one wants to disappoint him. It'd be like kicking the biggest puppy in the universe. It's a kind of magic. — Terry Pratchett

By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder - infinitely prouder - to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, Our Father Who Art in Heaven. — Douglas MacArthur

Earthly authority displays itself in giving orders, in magnificent apparel, in hordes of servitors, in sycophantic addresses; the authority of Jesus disposes of is, by contrast, spiritual, and expresses itself in serving, not being served, in seeking to be the least instead of the greatest, the last instead of the first, in finding wisdom in the innocence of children and truth in the foolishness of men rather than in those who pass for being sagacious and experienced in the world's ways. When we want to adulate men, we say they are godlike; but when God became Man, it was in the lineaments of the least of men. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Lord Bacchus, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me."
Bacchus dropped his hands and nodded.
"You have never killed a Druid all by yourself, and you never will. Only with hordes of Bacchants and Roman legionnaires and the aid of Minerva have you ever managed to slay a single one of us. Your lackeys may get me eventually, and I know that I will never be able to slay you, but admit to yourself now that you, alone, will never prove my equal. The earth obeys me, son, not some petty god of grape and goblet." I switched to English for a postscript, "So suck on that, bitch. — Kevin Hearne

Amazon took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work. — Seth Godin

I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of virgins. See wild stallions mount the prairie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being completed here. But I keep smiling. I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about as long as the youth of America knows what's going on. Brains, brawn, good teeth. tallness. — Don DeLillo

The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness. — Ludwig Von Mises

NOw he's back from the dead and he's come looking for her. Maybe he wants to get back together." (Isabelle)
"I doubt he sent a horde of demons to her house because he wants to 'get back together.'" (Alec)
"It wouldn't be my move. First the candy, then the apology letters, then the ravenous demon hordes. In that order." (Jace) — Cassandra Clare

.. they look like they've escaped from a nursing home. Everywhere I turn I see puffy skin & radiant expressions, crinkles & pearls, broad smiles & high hair... Collectively they all lean forward, like bamboo in the wind. Their postures may be cruelled by age but their excitement is adolescent. Cackling & wheezing with laughter the elderly hordes squeeze into the waiting vans & shuffle about... — Tim Latham

Mr. Stock came out of the competition tent carrying his zeppelin marrow on one shoulder and demanding to know what was going on. When he saw the hordes advancing on Aidan, he charged off that way, whirling the great vegetable. The Puck, who was rushing behind the horde, yelling at them to grab Aidan and kill Rolf, was Mr. Stock's first victim. The marrow caught him THOCK! on the side of the head. It laid the Puck out cold on the grass, but the mighty vegetable remained intact, mottled and glossy — Diana Wynne Jones

By day, Venice is a city of museums and churches, packed with great art. Linger over lunch, trying to crack a crustacean with weird legs and antennae. At night, when the hordes of day-trippers have gone, another Venice appears. Dance across a floodlit square. Glide in a gondola through quiet canals while music echoes across the water. Pretend it's Carnevale time, don a mask - or just a fresh shirt - and become someone else for a night. — Rick Steves

Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead, — Donna Tartt

The upshot of her tirade was that I was the devil's spawn and should be locked up in a tower before I unleashed hordes of the living dead to slaughter them all in their sleep. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much. — Kelley Armstrong

A thousand times rather face the wild hordes of the dead sea bottoms than meet the eyes of this beautiful young girl and tell her the thing that I must tell her. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

[...] So large was the universe of things called Oriental: roots, rugs, religions, noodles, hairstyles, hordes, healing arts, herbs and spices, fabrics, medicines, modes of war, types of astronomy, spheres of the globe, schools of philosophical thought, and salads. It applied to me, women, gum, dances, eyes, body types, chicken dishes, societies, civilizations, styles of diplomacy, codes of behaviour, fighting arts, sexual proclivities, and a particular kind of mind.
Apparently, the Orient produced people with a singular way of thinking. There was no way, wrote Jack London, for a Westerner to plumb the Oriental mind - it was cut from different cloth, functioned in an alien way. — Alex Tizon

First, the candy and flowers, then the apology letters, then the ravenous demon hordes. In that order. -Jace Wayland — Cassandra Clare

If there was one kind of hat Terry despised above all others, it was the baseball cap. There was nothing wrong with children wearing it, of course, but whenever he saw it on the head of an adult it seemed to symbolize everything that he most hated about America, even more potently than the figure of Mickey Mouse or the latest Coke adverts or the hordes of giant yellow 'M's which were even now beginning to advance across Britain like an unchecked virus. And even worse, Kingsley was wearing it back to front. This, without doubt, was the ultimate badge of imbecility. — Jonathan Coe

I want to be up there, being lauded and applauded and given all these and on the red carpet, waving at the hordes of people. — Morgan Freeman

Jazz. Here in Germany it become something worse than a virus. We was all of us damn fleas, us Negroes and Jews and low-life hoodlums, set on playing that vulgar racket, seducing sweet blond kids into corruption and sex. It was a plague sent out by the dread black hordes, engineered by the Jews. Us Negroes, see, we was only half to blame - we just can't help it. Savages just got a natural feel for filthy rhythms, no self-control to speak of. But the Jews, brother, now they cooked up this jungle music on purpose. All part of their master plan to weaken Aryan youth, corrupt its janes, dilute its bloodlines. — Esi Edugyan

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows. — Leo Tolstoy

There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came. — Paul Rudnick

As if we'd have sex in a cave surrounded by hordes of demons. This is reality, not your fevered imagination. — Cassandra Clare

Lives there upon any world such another as John Carter, Prince of Helium? Lives there another man who could fight his way back and forth across a warlike planet, facing savage beasts and hordes of savage men, for the love of a woman? — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities. — Gertrude Atherton

The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and the cruelties which they had practised to make their last stand against the swarming hordes of the dead sea bottoms that had driven them step by step to the uttermost pinnacle of the world where they were now intrenched behind an impenetrable barrier of superstition. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Church worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. — Mark Twain

Groups satisfy our brain's natural inclination to make sense of hordes of people we encounter and observe. This quality is so inherent that children intuitively understand the need to form groups without adults having to teach them. — Alexandra Robbins

You're carrying on as if I am being chased by hordes of men, when that is obviously not the case. At Stony Cross Park, men went out of their way to avoid my company - and you were one of them!"
The charge, though true, seemed to startle Sebastian. His face became taut, and he stared at her in stony silence. "You hardly made it easy for anyone to approach you," he said after a moment. "A man's vanity is more fragile than you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference. You could have exerted yourself a bit, you know. One brief meeting between the two of us ... one smile from you ... was all the encouragement I would have needed to jump on you like a grouse on laurel. — Lisa Kleypas

A couple of buffoons were running for some state-senate seat just vacated by the incumbent's prison term. One accused the other of being "against the Internet" - a knockout punch in a world where whole hordes of humans think better sex is a faster modem. — Andrew Vachss

The shot of Kapil Dev kissing the World Cup and hordes of Indian fans all over at Lord's is etched in my memory. Every Indian is proud of that victory, and every Indian player who has played the World Cup after that '83 win wants to bring the Cup home. — Suresh Raina

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true. — Nicholson Baker

He believed in courage combined with intelligence, and that was what he called strength. Courage has
been turned in his name against intelligence, and the virtues that were really his have thus been
transformed into their opposite: blind violence. He confused freedom and solitude, as do all proud spirits.
His "profound solitude at midday and at midnight" was nevertheless lost in the mechanized hordes that
finally inundated Europe. — Albert Camus

Somehow, I cannot see anyone describing me as gracious, loving, and happy." He frowned at his sandwich as if in puzzlement. "You are loving," Anna replied staunchly, though she hadn't exactly planned for those words to leave her mouth. "Now that is beyond surprising." The earl eyed her in the deepening shadows. "How do you conclude such a thing, Mrs. Seaton?" "You have endless patience with your family, my lord," she began. "You escort your sisters everywhere; you dance attendance on them and their hordes of friends at every proper function; you harry and hound the duke so his wild starts are not the ruination of his duchy. You force yourself to tend to mountains of business which you do not enjoy, so your family may be safe and secure all their days." "That is business," the earl said, looking nonplussed that his first sandwich had disappeared, until Anna handed him a second. — Grace Burrowes

For the better part of my childhood, my professional aspirations were simple - I wanted to be an intergalactic princess. I didn't care much about ruling hordes of space people. Mostly I wanted to wear the cape and the sexy boots and carry a cool weapon. — Janet Evanovich

Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia's defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews' aim, Nilus insisted, 'to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan'. The — Niall Ferguson

Still, I wait. I wait with my heart aflutter. People pass in front of me, pass by in hordes. It isn't that one; it isn't that one. I hold my shopping bag, shivering as I wait intently. Please don't forget me. Don't laugh at a 20-year old girl who goes to a rendezvous at the station day after day and then returns home without success; please remember me and keep me in your heart. The name of the little station, I purposely won't tell you. Even without my telling it to you, you'll catch sight of me someday. — Osamu Dazai

In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16's, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners — Starhawk

The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem ... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: 'Who shall be in charge of telling the story.' — Ben Hecht

Each pregnant Oak ten thousand acorns forms
Profusely scatter'd by autumnal storms;
Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds
Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads;
The countless Aphides, prolific tribe,
With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe;
Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big,
And pendent nations tenant every twig ...
- All these, increasing by successive birth,
Would each o'erpeople ocean, air, and earth.
So human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth ...
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breathes from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth's vast surface kindles, as it rolls! — Erasmus Darwin

Silk handkerchief that erupted out of the breast pocket, an affectation he had adopted to distance himself from the Westminster hordes in their banal Christmas-stocking ties and Marks & Spencer suits. — Michael Dobbs

Where did you find that one?"
"I have no idea. I'm a magnet for crazies, I guess."
"They must be able to sense a kindred spirit."
"Your one to talk. Don't you have more hordes of the undead to lead in a glorious revolution?"
"Zombies not undead. There's a fine distinction. And no. Right now I'm scouting new talent. The glorious revolution comes tomorrow. — Kiersten White

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease. — R. Buckminster Fuller

When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house. — Michael Barrett

I'll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words 'your generation'. I will teach you how not to demonise your enemies & how to make yourself unappetising when the hordes turn up to eat you. I'll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I'll teach you how to know what's missing. — Steve Toltz

At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes — George Orwell

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

It wouldn't be my move," Jace agreed. "First the candy and flowers, then the apology letters, then the ravenous demon hordes. In that order. — Cassandra Clare

We may be well on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated. — Warren E. Burger

The hordes of demonic activity at times can take advantage of those who are wounded by others in the body of Christ. When we allow any hurt we can be used of the enemy to sow discord into God's work and His body. — Greg Gordon

Despite the Internet 's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for marijuana brownies. — L. Neil Smith

Hell is Whole Foods on a Sunday. It's hordes of moms in lightweight fleeces pushing one another out of the way to get to bins of dry lentils. — Mindy Kaling

Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn't a very nice sensation not to want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. — Lionel Shriver

It has not been stylish to pay attention to those warrior castes who neither planted nor herded, but devoted their lives to pillage and forgotten causes: the illiterate Greek chieftains on their decade-long excursion to the plains of Asia Minor; the tribal bands of Northern Europeans who raided Rome and then its Christian outposts; the Asiatic "hordes" who swept through medieval Europe; the Crusaders who looted the Arab world; the elite officership of European imperialism; and so on. These were men - not counting their conscripts and captives - who lived only parasitically in relation to the production of useful things, who lived for perpetual war, the production of death — Anonymous

[Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century, a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies. — N. T. Wright

Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well
by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. — Sam Harris

Hordes of people lingered and gawked at the one moving car on the road as Rob drove over medians and sidewalks, narrowly avoiding them along the way. — J.S. Donvan Donvan