Short Country Quotes & Sayings

I think sometimes the bits of your life happen in the wrong order, or all at the same time and you waste time feeling angry about it, but that's the way it is, it's real life. You meet the person who you think could make you happy the rest of your life, but at the same time your ex-girlfriend who's told you umpteen times she never wants to see you again tells you you're going to be a dad.'
Elle took up the story.
'And then you move to another country and then the next time you see that person, even though its like no time has passed, you sleep together and then - your mum dies'
She gave a short, sad laugh.
'Yep that's rubbish timing — Harriet Evans

The Commons is one of the most depressing and intellectually unstimulating places in the country. [On the state of British politics — Clare Short

It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty ... than to find it among one's own people. And to the millions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape. — George F. Kennan

And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal. — S.C. Gwynne

I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short. — Anne Roiphe

But obviously, we can't afford to make some bad long-term decisions with regard to basic commitments our country has - trade those away for some short-term assistance that may or may not be there a month from now. — Fred Thompson

One day they might. I accept that in the short term the consequences are terrible. No one minimises those and I'm not seeking to do so. But what I am saying is that this is a country that has been brutalised for decades by this appalling regime and that the restoration of that country to its own people, the possibility of their deciding their future ... and indeed the way in which they go about thier lives, ultimately, yes, that will be a better place for people in Iraq. — Geoff Hoon

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies. — Andy Miller

I always rejoice when I see a tribunal filled with a man of an upright and inflexible temper, who in the execution of his country's laws can overcome all private fear, resentment, solicitation, and even pity it self. Whatever passion enters into a sentence or decision, so far will there be in it a tincture of injustice. In short, justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is therefore always represented as blind, that we may suppose her thoughts are wholly intent on the equity of a cause, without being diverted or prejudiced by objects foreign to it. — Joseph Addison

President Obama stands ready to work with everyone, because that's what the American people expect and deserve - not for the short term political advantages, but the long term health of our country. We don't spend time trying to figure out what's in the minds of Republicans, we try to keep our focus on the American people. — Valerie Jarrett

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. — Ernest Hemingway,

You must often leave your country, not necessarily physically, but mentally often! Leave your own music; leave your own religion! Leave your own culture, your own books and ideas! Walk around in the world of others, listen to what they speak and learn what they think! In short, get out of your puddle, sail to the ocean! Move, friend, move out of your country! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Given a short time with a psycho-politician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind. — Lavrentiy Beria

I someday hope to find the time and coin to invest more of my creative energy towards the visual media side of releasing music. I'd love to make short film videos pushing the conventional standards of what a country music video can be. — Sturgill Simpson

Be less about protecting any type of identity affiliated to a country or even ethnic background. Be more about the fact that we're here for a short time and Heaven is going to be a rainbow of people, multiculture, every generation. — Max Lucado

It's an interesting thing in this country. I haven't won a gold medal, yet Australians still take me into their houses and hearts, they know my name and they care. I think Aussies like the little Aussie battler and the person who will stand up for their rights and I've never been short of a word, especially with officialdom. — Raelene Boyle

Where would the Rockefellers be today if old John D. had gone on selling short-weight kerosene ... to widows and orphans instead of wisely deciding to mulct the whole country. — S.J Perelman

By 'intelligence' we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country - the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations. — Carl Von Clausewitz

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves? — Dave Eggers

We cannot shun our values as an immigrant nation. This is a wrong path. And while possibly it is a short-term political victory based on division and based on creating a wedge issue that splits people in this country, it is a long-term defeat for this Nation. — Raul Grijalva

No Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them. No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. — Winston S. Churchill

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads. — Ann Patchett

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. — John F. Kennedy

Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country] ... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years. — Adolf Hitler

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb's request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor's killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry's death was a short story in the back of the A section. — Michael Connelly

My own duty as a teacher ... is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I ... hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself on the ... art of music ... To bring about this result, we must trust the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country. — Antonin Dvorak

I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as if it were a thing apart — James Baldwin

I fought for years to free myself of all my cultural, economic and political chains, to be free of owning or being owned. I refused. God, how hard it is to refuse sometimes. Especially during times of hardship, refusal requires willpower. And each refusal expands the boundaries of one's loneliness. You know how it goes," I said, running out of breath. "I did not belong to my town. I had no regular city or country address, no regular job, no steady lover, husband, child or family. I was infinitely independent and unfettered. I was hungry but free. — Buket Uzuner

America Is A Gun

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona's hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun. — Brian Bilston

One of the best things about my job is that I get to meet a lot of great children's and YA authors at events all over the country. So I figured it might be fun to interview some of them and turn the interviews into short online comics. — Steve Sheinkin

But then Iraq happened after September 2001 and America claimed that Al Qaeda was there, and we all know that was a lie and we now know that our own Prime Minister deceived the country terribly. — Clare Short

That was thirteen hundred years ago. This is really no improvement upon the work of the Roman augurs. Has the trade of interpreting the Lord's matters gone out, discouraged by the time-worn fact that nobody succeeds at it? No, it still flourishes; there was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it. Whenever there has been an opportunity to attribute to Him reasonings and conduct which would make a half-witted human being ridiculous, there has always been an expert ready and glad to take advantage of it. — Mark Twain

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country. — Edmund Phelps

The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream. — Werner Herzog

Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important. — Manmohan Singh

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. — D.E. Stevenson

I think of myself as living so much outside borders or old categories that I choose as my leaders U2, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Sigur Ros, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, and the girl next door. By definition, in short, my leaders are the ones who think in terms larger, and more intimate, than any country. — Pico Iyer

We ought to increase legal immigration for our country's advantage. The high-tech world we are now dominating is dependent on educated folks, but we're short ... of workers. It is to our nation's advantage to encourage high-powered, smart people to come into our country. — George H. W. Bush

I had to suppress a smile. Sherlock Holmes once remarked of his brother, Mycroft, that you were as unlikely to find him outside of the Diogenes Club as you were to meet a tramcar coming down a country lane. Like Mycroft, Father had his rails, and he ran on them. Except for church and the occasional short-tempered dash to the train to attend a stamp show, Father seldom, if ever, stuck his nose out-of-doors. — Alan Bradley

Until 2008 the mosquitoes on Cape Hatteras were the worst I'd ever experienced. That would all change once we stepped foot into Sky Lakes Wilderness in southern Oregon during my second thru-hike of the PCT. The Oregon snowpack during the previous winter had been well above average, which left lingering snow in the high country that summer. P.O.D. and I had been on a faster pace than I had in 2004 on the PCT and we ended up being in Sky Lakes Wilderness about 3 weeks earlier which was theoretically about six weeks earlier considering the timeframe of the snow melt. Long story short, we showed up during the peak of the mosquito season. The mosquitoes in Sky Lakes made those in Cape Hatteras look like lazy houseflies. It was beyond brutal. We were lucky to escape without requiring a transfusion. — Lawton Grinter

Seven years is a short time in the history of a country's democracy. But in this short time, people of Bhutan have developed faith in the institutions of democracy. — Narendra Modi

The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries' experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight. — Henry A. Kissinger

The time groaned by as John made a fool of himself. Eventually, he grew numb to the death and sin around him. He even came to enjoy gallivanting cross-country like a true crusader. His name brought tears of joy or pain of anger to those he left in his wake. The result of his own unresolved pain. — Solange Nicole

I think the only universal thing is one individual. If you talk about a country or a nation or a culture, it's so vague. I mean what is a nation? A nation is full of nice and bad and long and tall and short and thin people. It's not like everybody is the same. — Marjane Satrapi

Short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things ... — Theodore Roosevelt

There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. — Barack Obama

Americans, by which I mean people who live in the United States, are incredibly juvenile about social change. Robin Morgan called it "ejaculatory politics": if it doesn't happen right away it doesn't happen. The Women's Movement in this country has all the same characteristics as the culture that we live in, short-term gratification, personal fulfilment, personal advancement, and yes, coming out as a lesbian can get in the way of that. Liberals and left-wing men have recolonised women around the fear of the right. This troubles me - it makes me feel like we're really suckers. — Andrea Dworkin

Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war. — Starhawk

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge
the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. — Fareed Zakaria

A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws, and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama's election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger. It — Jesmyn Ward

I shall not be deterred by people who don't see where the future of Africa lies. It is the short-sighted people who put their opinions in writing. They don't understand that the future of all countries lies in processing. — Yoweri Museveni

Historic American Buildings Survey - HABS for short - was one of FDR's greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. — Mary Anna Evans

It takes a long time for a country to build a strong base in science, but only a short time to destroy it. Germany was a sad example. It was a world leader in the sciences for more than a century, until its science base was demolished during the Nazi era, and the country ceded its position to the United States. — Torsten Wiesel

A voice reminds us that the land is ours, it will not be taken from us again; the country will never be a colony again. - 'Something Nice from London — Petina Gappah

The inescapable truth ... is that, within a miraculously short period of five years, your Government reduced this country from a position of world supremacy and absolute security to one of mortal peril. It took the Roman Empire a hundred years of the most enjoyable decadence to achieve the same result. — Robert Boothby

He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent. — Jonathan Swift

Scotland has been re-energized, and people all over the country have become involved in - and informed about - politics and government in a way that I have never known before. In short, we have put ourselves firmly in control of our country. — Nicola Sturgeon

Symbologists often remarked that France-a country renowned for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the Short-could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus. — Dan Brown

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted. — Sean Penn

There was once a country ruled by a king and queen who loved different things. The king loved cats and the queen loved birds. And just as cats and birds never get along, so it was that the king and queen never got along. And everyone in the country suffered as a result. In short, it was not a very pretty situation. — Kristin Kladstrup

One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country. — Nick Clooney

We have plenty of Confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our Confidence in. — Will Rogers

As the carriage bumped her bones along the dark country lanes, Martha decided that if she ever got back to her own time she would write a book called 'Travel in the Edwardian Era. It would be a short book - OUCH in capital letters followed by fifty pages of bad language. — Stephen Cole

What Gosta,' he said to himself, 'can you no longer endure? You have been hardened in poverty all of your life; you have heard every tree in the forest, every tuft in the meadows preach to you of sacrifice and patience. You, brought up in a country where the winter is severe, and the summer joy is very short, have you forgotten the art of bearing your trials?
'Oh Gosta, a man must bear all that life gives him with a courageous heart and a smile on his lips, else he is no man. Sorrow as much as you will. If you love your beloved, let your conscience burn and chafe within you, but show yourself a man and a Varmlander. Let your glances beam with joy, and meet your friends with a gay word on your lips! Life and nature are hard. They bring forth courage and joy as a counterweight against their own hardness, or no one could endure them ... — Selma Lagerlof

It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. — Italo Calvino

We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero-worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend. It is a Country and a Time where any bank clerk or common laborer can become a famous outlaw, where an outlaw can in a very short time be sainted in song and story into a Robin Hood, where a Frontier Model Excalibur can be drawn from the block at any gunshop for twenty dollars. — Oakley Hall

Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same. — Edward Hoagland

We need to move past the idea that a critical evaluation of our country's past (and its present, for that matter) means we are anti-American or unpatriotic. We can be proud of our country and its many positive features and noble ideas while still pointing out where we as a nation have come up short or been plainly wrong. — Wayne Gordon

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country. — Charles Dickens

I am a person of faith, so I come from a community that's involved in 360,000 churches across the country, that is an institution that could, in a relatively short period of time, provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of positive male role models. — Donald Miller

There is growing awareness of the beauty of country ... a sincere desire to keep some of it for all time. People are beginning to value highly the fact that a river runs unimpeded for a distance ... They are beginning to obtain deep satisfaction from the fact that a herd of elk may be observed in back country, on ancestral ranges, where the Indians once hunted them. They are beginning to seek the healing relaxation that is possible in wild country. In short, they want it. — Olaus Murie

One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth. — Alastair Campbell

I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. — Charles Darwin

Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees. — Justin Ker

When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos. — Robert Bolt

Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time — Winona LaDuke

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang. — Ambrose Bierce

In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it. — Hunter S. Thompson

I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty.
"Wetlands," in Phoebe. — Claudia Putnam

Tuck had always been made smaller made than Stan. Narrow shoulders, tiny hands and short fingers. Even as a young man his brown eyes were always watering like he'd been crying and his face never took hair well. What he had instead were four or five patches of hair that looked like a cluster of bee stingers popping straight out from his cheeks. — Sheldon Lee Compton

A country Sabbath is suggestive of rest and peace and quiet--sleepy blue skies, shadows golden and green, sunny fields, and the pink and snow of apple blossoms. June is at her height of radiant loveliness now. What a pity it is such a short time.

I am here in my old room--my little absolute kingdom. Here I read, write and dream. My favourite pictures adorn the walls, my well read books are on their shelves and my clock ticks me cheerful company. — L.M. Montgomery

I don't think generally politician come from democratic country. I think not that thinking. But sometimes little bit short-sighted. They are mainly looking for their next vote. — Dalai Lama

In a short amount of time, I've lived so much, had so many experiences and met so many different types of people and even lived in so many countries. If I had been in school, I'd be learning about the world from books. — Jennifer Lawrence

The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These notable qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing room or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry, which would hardly disgrace the conclave. Here is a ministry, and here is an opposition. Here are plots and circumventions, parties and factions equal to those which are to be found in courts. Nor are the women here less practiced in the highest feminine arts than their fair superiors in quality and fortune. Here are prudes and coquettes; here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal -- in short everything which is common to the most splendid assembly or politest circle. — Henry Fielding

I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance. Even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In, short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these and all who work for them. — Thomas Jefferson

Country music turns the stuff we say every day into a soundtrack ... taking an ordinary working man like me into that rough, happy country of longnecks and short tales. — Jay Heinrichs

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue. — Bruce Babbitt

The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years. In their country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and the beauty of life. It's a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful but that it is also tragically short. — Homaro Cantu

That same year the same Yakovlev explained on television that the decree rehabilitating all those who had been persecuted since 1917 was not at all a measure of clemency, as people in the Party were saying, but of repentance: "We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes." In short, there was a sudden consensus that for the last seventy years the country had been in the hands of a gang of criminals. — Emmanuel Carrere

The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans. — Robert Kennedy

If Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' were alive today, he would recognize the ethic that has informed capitalist and communist countries alike - economic growth before public health and well-being. The true enemies of the people ar those who continue to sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term gains. But perhaps we should all look in the mirror. — Susannah York

Workplaces need to respond to the reality of family life in the 21st century, and allowing employees to have seven sick days a year is a bare minimum, the fact that the United States is one of just a handful of countries that does not require paid family or sick leave is nothing short of shameful. — Rosa DeLauro

Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable. — Barbara Jordan

Would you believe it? Would you believe it. Okay, this is WLRB, all-talk radio. Take a short break, then come right back to talk about whatever you want. Man, but I'm telling you: what's happening to this country! — Avi

Lamm's system - dubbed the Baron Lamm Technique - worked well. From 1919 to 1930 it brought Lamm hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks around the country; after his death it was taught to John Dillinger, among others.* Lamm's system, still employed today succeeded not only because of its conceptual strength but also because Lamm was able to communicate his ideas and translate them into the seamless performance of an immensely difficult task. He was an innovator who taught with discipline and exactitude. He inspired through information. In short, Baron Lamm was a master coach. — Daniel Coyle

Just a few short years ago in the year 2000, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton administration, this country was running a surplus of $236 billion. — John Spratt

In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens. My great pain is, lest my poor endeavours should fall short of the kind expectations of my country. — Thomas Jefferson

Every time a child's promise is cut short by their legal status, our country wastes precious resources and loses talent we need. — Wendy Kopp

The PBA was a symptom of the Philippines' basketball obsession, not the cause. I was thrilled to be witnessing the professional game from inside Alaska's locker room, but that wasn't what brought me to Manila in the first place. I was inspired by the idea that a Southeast Asian nation populated by five-foot-five men and mostly forgotten by America except for its political corruption, widespread prostitution, and violent Muslim separatist movement could be devoted to hoops with a passion unequaled by any other country. It was a nationwide tale of unrequited love. Forty million short men obsessed with basketball--they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians. — Rafe Bartholomew

There are only a handful of countries that have experienced what Indonesia has endured: financial crisis, political instability, separatism, ethnic conflicts, terrorism and natural disasters. Given the array of challenges that confronted us, what Indonesia has become today is nothing short of remarkable. Indonesia today is a country with a different Islam, democracy and modernity can go hand in hand. — Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono