Prefaces Quotes & Sayings

Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart. — Steve Jobs

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further. — Malcolm Lowry

Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision. — John Naisbitt

I don't see the point in being bitter. — Shayne Ward

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing. — Timothy Egan

Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis. — Kim Newman

Everyone stumbles through it all the same; the main difference lies not in the lack of dysfunction but in the desire to be dishonest about it. Every family has problems, but only some let you see them. The rest just keep their chaos behind closed doors and out of conversation. — Kevin Breel

Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost. — Sarah Josepha Hale

The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator's notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic's that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader. — Anton Chekhov

Piper had a new entry in her top-ten list of Times Piper Felt Useless.
Fighting Shrimpzilla with a dagger and a pretty voice? Not so effective. — Rick Riordan

We love God with our mind by taking the time to fill our mind with the Word. — Mike Bickle

Look, I don't mind if the President sends a budget which he knows is not going to achieve anything. But when he prefaces his remarks as we just saw by saying we have to put politics aside, posing again as the one person in the country who rises above partisanship and party, speaks for the national interest, it's really grating. — Charles Krauthammer

The reduction in a number of pregnancies is - compensates for the cost of contraception ... Providing contraception as a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children reduces health care. — Kathleen Sebelius

Now I had lived long enough and had heard enough from urchins my age and from other slaves, to distrust the person who calls himself merciful, or just, or kindly. Usually these are the most cruel, niggardly and selfish people, and slaves learn to fear the master who prefaces his remarks with tributes to his own virtues. — Elizabeth Borton De Trevino

PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces.
SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1.
NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring.
RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1. — Gerald M. Weinberg

Love is love. It don't discriminate. And it sure as fuck don't wait 'til you're ready for it. — Belle Aurora

I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this. — E. Nesbit

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this ... because ... I am a natural-born mountebank. — George Bernard Shaw

A preface is usually an excrescence on a good book, and a vain apology for a worthless one; — Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

The surest way of finding peace of mind is that which helps the greatest number of others to find it — Napoleon Hill

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

He who always prefaces his tale with laughter, is poised between impertinence and folly. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

That was the thing about Loki. You resented him even when you were at your most grateful, and you were grateful to him even when you hated him the most. — Neil Gaiman

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces. — James Agate