Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

The happy ending is our national belief.

Mary: So did you get to first base? Beth: First base? I never left the concession stand.

A young girl was asked: ''Whose preaching brought you to Christ?'' ''It wasn't anybody's preaching; it was Aunt Mary's practicing,'' he replied. The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonna's or Mary Magdalene's.

Nicky: The Virgin Mary was born on THAT day. She was the product of a virgin birth too. Me: Immaculate conception is not genetic.

Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole, to Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, that slid into my soul.

A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary. Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a "round tuit" now has no excuse for further procrastination.

If none of us ever read a book that was 'dangerous,' had a friend who was 'different' or joined an organization that advocated 'change,' we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. Whose fault is that Not really McCarthy's. He didn't create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgement of children.

I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.

The capabilities of the human mind are enormous. There is usually no inherent reason you cannot accomplish whatever goal you set for yourself.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

You can't run the Church on Hail Marys.

Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.

The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress -- these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.

Your are in charge. You have the ability to master you destiny.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.

Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her?

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.

In violence we forget who we are.

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a ''work'' of man.

We all live in suspense from day to day In other words, you are the hero of your own story.

So, Delaware's in Maryland, right?

Mary had a little lamb and the doctor fainted.

We are the hero of our own story.