Quotes About People

Perhaps the greatest use of history is that it teaches compassion for both sides and especially compassion for ordinary people caught up in great events.

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A'atsika way. It isn't, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don't be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether.

People are a wonder. They will always surprise you, for both good and ill.

Look how many millions of people are underemployed or have lost their jobs. The last thing I'm going to do is play politics with their future.

In order to write about real people - parents, children, lovers, friends, enemies, brothers, uncles, or the occasional passerby - it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.

For a large part of what I know about people and things I have to thank an art of listening which wise teachers taught me early.

Exasperatingly, we're all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious.

Exasperatingly, we're all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious.

In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.

What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive.

Myself, after having not a child but this particular one, I couldn't see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

People, not methodologies or tools, make projects successful.

People who like to fix other people become "catastrophizers. Fixing becomes an unconscious way of preventing a "what if" from happening.

and she knows that she is somehow being diminished, that the care she is being shown by Scarlett is warped and wrong, that Scarlett has been taught how to love by people who don't know how to love and that everything she thinks is good is actually bad

She says this with a strange certainty, as if the world were not full of dangerous people who prey on the vulnerable, as if nothing bad could possibly have happened to her daughter between three o'clock on Saturday morning and now.

People want to do all manner of things, Kim. If it wasn't for people doing things that the likes of you and I would never do, I'd be out of a job.

What a strange people we are, she thinks of her countrymen: where other people take to the shade, to the aircon, stay indoors and close their curtains in the heat, the English hurl themselves at it, like pigs into a furnace.

I reflected that for all the people you lost touch with or couldn't hold on to, life occasionally made up for it by giving you the right person at the right time.

No. But I understand her. Life makes people what they are.

He's not going to die, you know. It's only nice, saintly people who suffer untimely deaths." She gave a quiet laugh. "Whereas selfish bastards like St. Vincent live to torment other people for decades.

But life is what novels are about. A novel can contain more truth than a thousand newspaper articles or scientific papers. It can make you imagine, just for a little while, that you're someone else—and then you understand more about people who are different from you.

A budget should reflect the values and priorities of our nation and its people.