Least Quotes
More Least Quotes
Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.
Richard Brautigan— 1967 Trout Fishing In America,'Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter'.
If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.
Martin Luther King Jr.— From a 1968 Playboy magazine interview.
Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
bernard baruch— As quoted in Meyer Berger’s New York (1960)
The disciples seem alone; but up yonder, in some hidden cleft of the hills, their Master looks down on all the weltering storm, and lifts His voice in prayer. Then when the need is sorest, and the hope least, He comes across the waves, making their surges His pavement, and using all opposition as the means of His approach; and His presence brings calmness; and immediately they are at the land.
alexander maclaren— Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895, p. 110)
Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?
buster keaton— Interview with Studs Terkel (1960)
I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.
Abraham Lincoln— Remarks at the Monogahela House (February 14, 1861); quoted in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 209.
When their lordships asked Bacon How many bribes he had taken He had at least the grace To get very red in the face.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley— 1939 Baseless Biography,'Bacon'.
My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly — and worse — of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" — still the "darkness" is majestic.
john constable— Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett, (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), vol. 3, p. 122; also quoted in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Westview Press, 1979, ISBN 0-064-30089-7), ch. 3, p. 91
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
ernest hemingway— Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.
muhammad iqbal— Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930 (from University of Columbia website)
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.
felix frankfurter— Speech accepting an award from the National Institute for Immigrant Welfare, Biltmore Hotel, New York (May 11, 1933).
The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.
jesus christ— The Gospel of Matthew 13:31 (KJV).
“Titus, have you ever had your heart broken?”
“Oh, son. How could you ask a man who used to play the blues a question like that?”
“How long does it take to go away?”
“A broken heart?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no precise formula, Sammy.”
“Just give me an estimate.”
“A good rule of thumb is at least half the time that you were in love. Or twice the time. It all just depends.”
— Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (2013)
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
marvin minsky— Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988) Ch.1
Well, at least it was a fruit pie.
anita bryant— The Pieing of Anita Bryant: YouTube video
He could not sing for them a sweet song, or create a "thing of beauty" which should be "a joy for ever," or touch their hearts, or fire their spirits, or deepen their reverence or their fervour. He was not a Poet, a Priest, or a Prophet, but only a cold, clear, Intelligence, raying down pure white light, which brightened everything on which it fell, but warmed nothing—a Star of at least the second, if not of the first magnitude, in the Intellectual Firmament.
henry cavendish— George Wilson, The Life of the Honble Henry Cavendish (1851) p.186
The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don't think he deserves it.
rudy giuliani— On responsibility for failure to prevent the September 11 attacks (27 September 2006) "Giuliani Defends Clinton on 9/11 Efforts" CBS News (28 September 2006)
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
harriet beecher stowe— "Dress, or Who Makes the Fashions" in The Atlantic Monthly (1864).
If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
lord byron— Journal for Saturday, 27th November 1813; Quoted in Letters and Journals of Lord Byron by Thomas Moore (1830), Vol III, Chap. XVII, p. 208
In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).
stephen jay gould— Preface, p. 6
England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
philip roth— The Counterlife, Chapter 5 (1986)
Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.
George Bernard Shaw— The Two Pioneers
I, the solitary fish, a fish apart (apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish), write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two whose glittering scales, so fleeting, may only be the dark's embarrassed wink.
wisława szymborska— "In Heraclitus' River"
But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.
virginia woolf— "Women and Fiction"
A deliberate rejection of duty prescribed by already recognized truth cannot but destroy, or at least impair most seriously the clearness of our mental vision.
— Henry Liddon, p. 201. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Protestantism itself, in its early phases, was plainly a movement toward mysticism: its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly veil separating man from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg, Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all the ferocious certainty of a medieval Pope, and his followers were docily accepting his teaching.
— H. L. Mencken (1930) Treatise on the Gods. Ch. 1
