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powerful quotes

  •    This republic has been much more powerful than it is at present, as it is still likelier, to sink than increase in its dominions.

    -Joseph Addison
      On Venice. Remarks on Several parts of Italy.

  • No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers in contempt.Theydoit becausetheyget no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.

    - Saul Bellow
      Interview in The Paris Review, no.37, winter issue.

  • As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time.

    - Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
      On resuming his Cassandra column in the Daily Mirror, Sep, after the end of  World War II.

  • Supponam igitur non optimum Deum, fontem veritatis, sed genium aliquum malignum, eundemque summe potentem et callidum, omnem suam industriam in eo posuisse, ut me falleret. I will suppose then, not that there is a supremely good God, the source of truth; but that there is an evil spirit, who is supremely powerful and intelligent, and does his utmost to deceive me.

    - Rene Descartes
    Meditationes,1st meditation (translated by G E M Anscombe and Peter Geach).

  • In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as isnatural, was dueto the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
    Selected Essays (1932),'The Metaphysical Poets'.

  • Would you rather have butter or guns? †preparedness makes us powerful.Butter merely makes us fat. See Goebbels 359:7.

    - HermannWilhelm Goering
      Speech, Hamburg.

  • Non enim quo quisque ditior sive potentior, ideo et melior: fortunae illud est, hoc virtutis. To be wealthieror more powerful isnot necessarily tobe worthier: the former are products of fortune, the latter stems from virtue.

    -He  lo|«  se
    c.1135  First letter to Peter  Abelard.

  • 'It's powerful,' he said. 'What?' 'That one drop of Negro bloodbecause just one drop of black blood makes a man coloured. One dropyou are a Negro!'

    - (James Mercer) Langston Hughes
      Simple Takes a Wife.

  • It is now apparent that this great, this powerful, this formidablekingdomisconsidered onlyas a province of a despicable electorate.

    -William, 1st Earl of Chatham known as  the Elder Pitt
      Speech to the House of Commons,10 Dec.

  • Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

    -Jerome Siegel
    Introduction for the Superman radio serial. Quoted in Time,14 Mar1988.

  • Merely to adopt the more powerful assumption is no more than to assume the more powerful conclusion.

    - Robert M Solow
      In theJournal of Economic Perspectives, 8:53.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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