Powerful But Cheap Quotes & Sayings

The tree leaves rustled like that noise e-books make when you turn the page. — Daniel Nayeri

Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do
to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind. — Michael Pollan

I can't listen to my own voice, I don't like it. You see all your mistakes when you hear your voice. You see all your imperfections. — Cher

Under all wrongdoing lies personal vanity or the feeling that we are endowed and privileged beyond our fellows. — James Stephens

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jack rabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then ... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels — Hunter S. Thompson

The fact is, my friends, most Americans don't want more government. They want less government. — Mike Huckabee

Within a moment of silence, all is known that needs to be known. Within a moment of breath, all of life surrounds you...from the stars, the sun, the trees and all of humanity. Within a moment of a smile, love embraces the universe and beyond. It only takes a moment of being open to the wisdom, the beauty and the Grace. ~jh — Jennifer Hillman

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage. — Steve Almond

Sometimes words were cheap. They could be powerful, but in those rare occasions like now, words meant nothing. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui. — Pat Conroy

Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap. — Stephen King

Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships - the one-day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of "school" to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. — John Taylor Gatto

I know what she used to do sometimes. She kept her best cape she wore on the street in there, and she used occasionally to go up there to get it and to take it into her room. She kept a great deal in the guest room drawers. — Lizzie Andrew Borden

He felt sandbagged. Doomsday, Armageddon. Booze begets instant misconduct and regret. He walked to the couch and fell down. — James Ellroy

The brooch was a cheap bauble, but one with powerful sentimental value. Not that Irene was the sentimental type, aside from the smother-love she lavished on her toy poodle, but she'd known Colette her whole life. They'd grown up in the same grimy apartment house in Bay Ridge and had at one time — Pamela Burford

I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition. — Flea

One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd. — Carl Jung

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to "natural resources" for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. — Lierre Keith

The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don't feel like going on stage and being funny. — Greg Giraldo

Money is a cheap but powerful substitute for Jesus, and wielding money is intoxicating, but it won't usher in the kingdom of God, nor will it ensure eternal treasures. — Mary E. DeMuth

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before ... We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy ... to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer. — Daniel J. Boorstin

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?"
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true. — Lois Lowry

And here's the kicker: food manufacturers are using a gasoline additive known as hexane to process soy products (and some vegetable oils). Soybeans are soaked in large vats of hexane to assist in the extraction of substances such as protein and oils from them. An independent lab has found hexane residue in soy-based foods, but the FDA does not require any testing for hexane, even in baby foods. It is used by the food industry because it is cheap to do so and because the FDA lets them get away with it. The soy industry is incredibly powerful and influential. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists hexane, incidentally, as a hazardous chemical. — Nora T. Gedgaudas

Girl power reduces the theoretical complexity of feminism to a cheery slogan ("GIRLS KICK ASS!"); it represents the ultimate commodification of empowerment; it reinforces the simplistic conception of feminism as being, at heart, "all about choices." But most of all, it it grabbed the rhetoric from one of the most potentially powerful, yet woefully misunderstood, feminist uprisings of my generation, discarded every ounce of political heft, and reduced it to cheap iron-on letters on a baby T. — Rachel Fudge