Know Nothings Quotes & Sayings

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal. We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy." In — Joshua Wolf Shenk

I keep attacking the villains, the know-nothings, the people who want to take our freedoms away. — Al Goldstein

I guess we'd be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well. — Jennifer Aniston

Whether it's a professional, academic keeping people out by using certain mystifying language, or technologists presenting their work as incredibly complicated, no one can understand it (especially not "moms," who are always invoked as the ultimate know-nothings, which is incredibly insulting to a whole lot of people). — Astra Taylor

Will you carry the words of love with you? — Cat Stevens

The active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group - the "know-nothings" - must win. — Warren Buffett

Do you ever have one of those weeks where you know nothings gonna go right? — Dov Davidoff

I wonder briefly whether a schizophrenic Buddhist would be At Two with the universe. — John Dolan

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop ... — Sarah Ruhl

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet ... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way
on their own terms. — George Packer

Have you ever been in love? Stay well clear. It leaves you very bitter and very twisted. — Tamzin Outhwaite

The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings. — Mignon McLaughlin

When a man is sufficiently motivated, discipline will take care of itself. — Albert Einstein

Be faithful in all your exercises of piety and virtue; be always resigned; be satisfied, in the superior part of your soul, to taste, without relish, the contentment of doing God's will. Thus after the winter the spring will come, with its flowers, and you will hear the voice of the turtle-dove in this land. — Paul Of The Cross

Your power is not in yesterday or in tomorrow. It's not over there somewhere waiting for you to reach it. It's not hidden behind some goal or achievement. Your power is right here, right now. Your power is today. What will you do with today? — Emily Maroutian

In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations
fear. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is. — Thomas Jefferson

You see gentlemen, there are ideas ... that is, you see, when some ideas are said out loud, put into words, they come out terribly stupid. They come out so that you're ashamed of yourself. But why? For no reason at all. Because we're all good-for-nothings and can't bear the truth, or I don't know why else. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

China is an area where we need to be present. Lots of companies want to supply their products to China. — Gennady Timchenko

You make it all sound so simple. Run your guts out ... collapse at the finish, throw up, that makes a good runner. Sounds like you regret not being more like Prefontaine ... Everyone gripes to me that American marathoners are 'lazy-no-good-for-nothings'. My point is, many people have criticisms, but few have valid answers. I'd like to know what happened to the guys that kicked my ass in high school. — Keith Brantly

Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests." — Richard Dawkins

The rest of the place was so dilapidated-but-trying that some of its offices and classrooms were still housed in old buildings abandoned by the neighboring State Mental Hospital, unfit for the mentally challenged but perfetly fine for "educating" the parated of probably-ought-to-major-in-business willfully ignorant know-nothings that rotated in and out of its former cells for a couple of months each semester before dropping out. — Mark Panek

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.26 — Eric Foner

Here, there is one thing which is different from all recorded. Here is some dual life that is not as the common. She was bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking, oh, you start. You do not know that, friend John, but you shall know it later, and in trance could he best come to take more blood. In trance she dies, and in trance she is UnDead, too. So it is that she differ from all other. Usually when the UnDead sleep at home," as he spoke he made a comprehensive sweep of his arm to designate what to a vampire was 'home', "their face show what they are, but this so sweet that was when she not UnDead she go back to the nothings of the common dead. There is no malign there, see, and so it make hard that I must kill her in her sleep. — Bram Stoker

He doesn't know if the words they are using actually mean the things they purport to mean or whether the words have taken on a new significance. They are talking about nothing, after all. And yet these words, these nothings, are all they have, and he wishes there were whole dictionaries of them. — Rachel Joyce

While sitting on the hopper, in a blissful state of belieflessness, the Universe sent me this silly pun: Arrogant know-it-alls actually know nothing,
while humble know-nothings seem to know everything... — Maximus Freeman

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. — Abraham Lincoln

Everyone changes all the time. — Ken Livingstone

The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals. — Saul Alinsky

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics. — Martha Gellhorn

The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. — Doris Kearns Goodwin