Mined Quotes & Sayings

The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn't working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn't working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it. — Assata Shakur

Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily. — David McCandless

I'm working! What are you doing? Besides being...
Being what?
Wait a minute...
Sarcastic? Unfeeling? British?
It's an animal.
Where?
No, the word!
Still you have to admit, I am... very British. I don't say hard R's.
You know what I like? Brown sauce. What's it made of? Science doesn't know!
It's made of brown.
Brown. Mined from the earth by the hardscrabble brown miners of North Brownderton.
Oh, my God. I find lentils completely incomprehensible. What the sun-dappled hell is Echo doing at Fremont?
That's got nothing to do with the drug, which means our problems are huge and indomitable.
Ooh. I could eat that word. Or a crisp. Do you have any crisps?
You haven't seen my drawer of inappropriate starches? C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!
Oh my god, I'm having such a terrible day. — Joss Whedon

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What is acted out on the female body parallels the larger practices of domination, fragmentation, and conquest against the earth body, which is being polluted, strip-mined, deforested, and cut up into parcels of private property. Equally, this pattern points to the fragmentation of the psyche, which ultimately underlies and enables all of this damage. — Jane Caputi

We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded. — Rebecca Solnit

I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons.
But the past resists that.
It holds too much evidence of too many things. — David Levithan

It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure. — Huston Smith

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory ... dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it. — Rumer Godden

I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others. — Neal Stephenson

There were eruptions against the convict labor system in the South, in which prisoners were leased in slave labor to corporations, used thus to depress the general level of wages and also to break strikes. In the year 1891, miners of the Tennessee Coal Mine Company were asked to sign an "iron-clad contract": pledging no strikes, agreeing to get paid in scrip, and giving up the right to check the weight of the coal they mined (they were paid by the weight). They refused to sign and were evicted from their houses. Convicts were brought in to replace them. — Howard Zinn

In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why our miners have to dig so deep. — Suzanne Collins

You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain's factory that he's just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion's taking place already - it's always been taking place. You just didn't notice ... — Tom McCarthy

My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies. — Bjarne Stroustrup

You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all
not some
all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value? — Warren Buffett

They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
MUST know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves. — Alice Walker

I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them. — Dan Savage

Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?" Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth - " "They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em." "Can we?" "You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls. — Larry Niven

It's mined, I whisper. That explains everything. — Suzanne Collins

Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work. — R. Buckminster Fuller

.....I'm certain I asked for a cowboy one December past--
For I wanted the excitement of pioneers to last;
I ached to sing with a fiddle, speak with a drawl and twang;
I surely requested John Wayne to be part of my gang.

Of course I dreamed of a cowboy in those Yuletides of yore--
For I wanted that ace, that corral fighter, that scout roar;
I ached for the authentic frontier hero of the West;
I surely requested the sacred battleground's finest.

I did pray Santa'd give me a cowboy some time ago--
For I wanted a legend in denim wrangler for beau;
I ached to be rounded up safely by my saddled knight;
I surely requested I be prospected, mined, settled right...


-----excerpted from the poem 'A Cowboy For Christmas' in the book FROM GUAM TO CROWN CITY CORONADO (THANKS TO HERMANN, MISSOURI): A JOURNEY IN POESY, by Mariecor Ruediger — Mariecor Ruediger

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide. — Salman Rushdie

After Mrs. Culpepper, Max probably knew more about her than any other person in her life. They were the only two people who knew of her dream to buy a country cottage. And he was the only one to know of her silly wish for a hound.

Which, now that she thought on it, was a sad state of affairs, indeed. She had no better claim to friendship outside of Mrs. Culpepper than a man with whom she'd spent such a nominal amount of time? And who had been read to toss her bodily from Caldwell Manor only yesterday?

Surely she had more depth of character than what could be mined in the course of an evening. She did not begin and end with her dreams of a thousand pounds, a hound, and a home. She was vastly more complex, far more interesting than that. She had to be. The alternative was too depressing to entertain. Almost as depressing as never having known a friend who'd not been paid to keep her company. But that, at least, could be changed. — Alissa Johnson

The boarding school memoir or novel is an enduring literary subgenre, from 1950s classics such as The Catcher in the Rye to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. Doust's recognisably Australian contribution to the genre draws on his own experiences in a West Australian boarding school in this clever, polished, detail-rich debut novel. From the opening pages, the reader is wholly transported into the head of Jack Muir, a sensitive, sharp-eyed boy from small-town WA who is constantly measured (unfavourably) against his goldenboy brother. The distinctive, masterfully inhabited adolescent narrator recalls the narrator in darkly funny coming-of-age memoir Hoi Polloi (Craig Sherborne) - as does the juxtaposition of stark naivety and carefully mined knowingness.' - Bookseller+Publisher — Jon Doust

From space the little world looked like nothing much - perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind - together with numbers of smaller noshmates - were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body.

I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names - Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like - that served vessels bound to or fro the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined. — Julian May

The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption ... The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn't, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green. — Peter W. Huber

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face. — Judith Perelman Rossner

I've always been a people-watcher, and as an actor, later, I just mined all those little details. — Sissy Spacek

I wish i could tell you that through the tragedy i mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that i could pass on to you.I didn't.The cliches apply-people are what count,life is precious,materialism is over rated, and the little things matter,live in the moment-and i can repeat them to you ad nauseam.you might listen, but you won't internalize.Tragedy hammers it hm.Tragedy etches into your soul.You might not be happier.But you will be better. — Harlan Coben

The original stories are mined out, and all that's left is fool's gold. — Lauren Beukes

I don't think tablets are where we should be focused. But I do think they could end up being an efficient way of delivering textbooks. They're just not really that, yet. There's all sorts of poisons and mined minerals and carnage that goes on to make a tablet. Way more than to print a book. Or a bunch of books. — Douglas Rushkoff

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. — Gretel Ehrlich

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies. — Kevin Spacey

This is essentially why gold is still valuable in the twenty-first century. If gathered together, all the gold ever mined would fit inside a large town house. — Mark Miodownik

For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond mined holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd. — Paul Keating

In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory. — Anthony Daniels

I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film. — Jason Aaron

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. — Ayelet Waldman

Anna held herself quiet, with effort. What Molly had said was pure spite: she was saying, I'm glad that you are going to be subjected to the pressures the rest of us have to face. Anna thought, I wish I hadn't become so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn't have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can't I accept that one's closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs? — Doris Lessing

Family life is tough, I'll say that for it. But in my case, I've mined the family. In a sense, I've used it. I've used what happened - the different events, the births of children, birthdays. Connecting, not connecting. Regret, shame, guilt. I mean, they're all in the songs. And love, too, I hasten to add. — Loudon Wainwright III

Consider the rock from which you were cut, the quarry from which you were mined. — Anonymous

Gold is hoarded. It's estimated that 95 percent of all gold ever mined is still around. — Robert Kiyosaki

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture - exploit the new thing then move on.
There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are. — Jeanette Winterson

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right. — Nigel Hamilton

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth. — Napoleon Hill

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors - cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights. — Thomas L. Friedman

I've always tried to make the strip animated, even when the characters aren't moving, with expressions or perspectives or some sort of exaggeration. There's great potential for that which has yet to be fully mined. — Bill Watterson

For proponents of ecosystem-based management,the good news is that another new book, Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans, conveys the topic at its state-of-the-art level of development ... both Marine Ecosystems and Global Change and Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans are valuable troves that could profitably be mined, and any academic bookshelf would wear them well. — Carl Safina

People like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation ... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped. — Michelle Tea

In real life, I am trying to save the Steve Irwin wildlife preserve. It's in Australia, up on Cape York, and it's in danger of being strip-mined. — Bindi Irwin

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Satellites record data in different parts of the light spectrum that we can't see. And it's that information that allows satellites to be so powerful in terms of looking at things like vegetation health, finding different kinds of geology that may indicate an oil deposit or some kind of mineralogical deposit that can be mined. — Sarah Parcak

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer. — Julianna Baggott

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. — John Green

After having, I think, rather successfully mined the horror-comedy aspects of this concept over the course of Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, the fans are really telling us that they want it to be scary again. Doing the remake just provides us with a really good opportunity to bring it home, so to speak. — David Kirschner

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil - and quickly - over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies, which is the sweetest thing that I can think of right now. The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost three hundred sheets of paper, which is about the number that I used to print out the manuscript for this book. Our — Hope Jahren

There has come a time when we can no longer remain silent but must speak up for our country which is being sold, abused, mined, depleted, drained, overworked, over-loved, its plants and animals becoming endangered and exterminated faster than we can renew them. Our country is silent, so we must speak and act to save it. — Di Morrissey

As each layer of shadow is mined from the darkness, as each fear is faced and each projection reclaimed, the gold shines through. — Connie Zweig

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites. — Piers Paul Read

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth. We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education. — Richard Wright

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it. — Susan Vreeland

Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them. — Mike Harding

No band on 21st-century radio has mined pre-grunge hair-metal's sleaze like L.A.'s Buckcherry. So it makes poetic sense that they'd spend their sixth album tallying all seven deadly sins. — Chuck Eddy

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. — George Carlin

The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed. — Ivan Illich

The gold of her promise
has never been mined

Her borders of justice
not clearly defined

Her crops of abundance
the fruit and the grain

Have not fed the hungry
nor eased that deep pain

Her proud declarations
are leaves on the wind

Her southern exposure
black death did befriend

Discover this country
dead centuries cry

Erect noble tablets
where none can decry

"She kills her bright future
and rapes for a sou

Then entraps her children
with legends untrue"

I beg you

Discover this country

from America — Maya Angelou

Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink. — James M. Cain

In the right hands, anything could be mined into so much more. — Taylor Stevens

She saw some boulders she would have wagered had once been toes on a statue, though why anyone would make a statue that large with bare feet she could not imagine, and another time the way led through a forest of thick fluted stones among the trees, the weathered stumps of columns, many toppled and all long since mined almost to the ground for their stone by local farmers. A pleasant — Robert Jordan

More gold had been mined from the mind of men than the earth it self — Napoleon Hill

Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth. — Van Jones

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men. — Heather O'Neill

Toward 1175 rich veins of copper, silver, and gold were found in the Erz Gebirge (i.e., ore mountains); Freiberg, Goslar, and Annaberg became the centers of a medieval "gold rush"; and from the little town of Joachimsthal came the word joachimsthaler - meaning coins mined there - and, by inevitable shortening, the German and English words thaler and dollar. — Will Durant

And no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled. — Ayn Rand

The experience reminds me of a favorite saying: Most of the yield from research efforts comes from the coal that is mined while looking for diamonds. — Paul D. Boyer

Usually when your imagination is bigger then one's comprehension, this normally means you've out grown the small circle. Get with like-mined people and go after your vision.
By T-cupp — Takina Cupp

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause. — Francine Prose

Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon disposal. Though when it comes to the largest mass-produced battery-powered gadget ever created - the electric car - environmentalists cannot jump from their seats fast enough to applaud it. — Ozzie Zehner

This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out. — Ralph Nader

Nothing - and I mean, really, absolutely nothing - is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilised - more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines - and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. — Bill Bryson

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to "outclever" the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight), or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias). — Gordon D. Fee

Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did. — Jerry Saltz

I don't mined being lied to, but what ever you do never betray me — Pikmin100xx

She was mined for the children
in her, one daughter, then another,
a short seam, quick to clay,
and not a single son to save them. — Robert Wrigley