Quotes About People

Basic decisions of our society are made through the expressed will of the people. That is why when we see these liberties threatened, instead of falling apart, our nation becomes unified and our democracies come together... in spite of our varied backgrounds and many racial strains.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.

But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it's all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another.

You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.

Aunt Lina said that spirits existed, but not in the places, or in the alleys, or near the ancient gates of the Vatso. They existed in people's ears, in the eyes when eyes looked inside and not out, in the voice as soon as it begins to speak, in the head when it thinks, because words are full of ghosts but so are images. Is it true, Mamma?

C'era qualcosa di insostenibile nelle cose, nelle persone, nelle palazzine, nelle strade, che solo reinventando tutto come in un gioco diventava accettabile. L'essenziale, però, era saper giocare io e lei, io e lei soltanto, sapevamo farlo.

that my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn't books that made people good but good people who made some good books.

Parlammo un po' di quando aveva conosciuto Fernando e s'erano innamorati, disse una cosa che mi colpì molto. Disse: "Vuoi bene per tutta la vita a persone che non sai mai veramente chi sono".

Am meisten fürchten müssen wir uns vor der Raserei verängstigter Menschen.

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.

you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.

De Sade says you must commit crimes. In using the word crime we're adopting the consensus term, though among ourselves we would not describe any of our actions as such. We need the universally valid norm to get a kick out of our own extremeness. We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people, but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils.

We are dealing here not with the dogmas of a church, but rather with events that for thousands of years have exercised the most powerful influence in the history of a living people. Jewish children were not taught: 'These are the things we Jews believe in', but 'These are the things that happened to us and made us what we are

I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources.

Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

How comfortable it was to read about comfortable people!

Was this because their neurological hardwiring made them better at systems, while women were better at empathy—because men valued abilities and things, while women valued feelings and people? How could we learn to place less value on feelings and people?

My mother said that that had been wrong. She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.

English fondness for France is normally a sort of neutron love: take away the people and leave the buildings standing.

There are four kinds of people to avoid in the world: the assholes, the asswipes, the ass-kissers, and those that just will shit all over you.

The profound experience of childbirth does not produce profound people. If this were so, the guy with ten kids would be a prophet and priests would be out of work.