Bel Kaufman Quotes

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.

Bel Kaufman

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Quotes to Explore

• Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

  

  William Ellery Channing
  • Book
  • Soul
  • Reading

• The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

  

  Diane Ackerman
  • Balance
  • Humans
  • Distance

• You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

  

  Alice Mattison
  • Should
  • Confident

• “I'm not trying to change the world. I'm trying to stop the world from changing me.”

  

  Ammon Hennacy
  • World
  • Trying
  • Change

• I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

  

  Steve Martin
  • Comedy
  • Form
  • Comic

• Now that, my friends, is what we vampires call a good exit.

  

  Chloe Neill
  • Call
  • Vampires
  • Exit

• The people of South Carolina support conservatives who are trying to push real change, and the people of South Carolina expect their presidential candidates to back them up when they show courage.

  

  Nikki Haley
  • People
  • Real
  • Trying

• One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

  

  Carolyn Heilbrun
  • Lawyers
  • Drains
  • Hires

• People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

  

  Campbell McGrath
  • Poetry
  • Role
  • Killed

• Jacques Ellul suggested too much information creates a confused sense of impotence: The infinite multiplicity of facts that I am given about each situation makes it impossible for me to choose or decide. I thus adopt the general attitude of letting things take their course. But the course that things take is essentially that of the process of technical development. . . . The more the number and power of means of intervention increase, the more the aptitude and ability and will to intervene diminishes. . . . Information is the main carrier of contraception.

  

  Craig Detweiler
  • Information
  • Development
  • Technical

• Because in the New Normal you are more worried about the return of your capital, not return on your capital.

  

  Mohamed El-Erian
  • Normal
  • Return
  • Worried

• About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.

  

  Carl Zimmer
  • Way
  • Humans
  • Made

• A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.

  

  William Shenstone
  • Objects
  • Oaks

• I am a pretty level-headed person, but that person, Harry Reid, has been the most destructive entity in Washington when it comes to civility. By far.

  

  Dana Perino
  • Washington
  • Civility
  • Levelheaded

• Civility is not simply about manners.

  

  James A. Leach
  • Manners
  • Civility

• I think the things that are more painful to me are not the intrusion of paparazzi, it's the lack of civility that I find more intimidating and far more painful an experience. It's the lack of critical thinking. It's the endless snarky, mean way we talk about each other, we approach each other. The anonymity of being cruel, the delight in tearing people down. The tabloid era that we find ourselves in is a cultural boneyard, and that is painful to me.

  

  Sarah Jessica Parker
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Mean

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.

  

  Bel Kaufman
  • Civility
  • Biographers
  • Buys