Doris Lessing Quotes

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

Doris Lessing

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Quotes to Explore

• We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts.

  

  A. Philip Randolph
  • World
  • Think
  • Eye

• I would like all French children to have unlimited opportunities opened up for them as French minister of education.

  

  Najat Vallaud-Belkacem
  • Up
  • Children
  • Education

• Sometimes I'd like to play the bad guy and sometimes I'd like to die in a movie.

  

  Jackie Chan
  • Bad
  • Movie
  • Guy

• Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

  

  Natasha Trethewey
  • Life
  • Up
  • Growing

• Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.

  

  Wendell Phillips
  • Ability
  • Create
  • Conquer

• I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.

  

  Lana Del Rey
  • Nothing
  • Without
  • My Own

• It's not like I've ever been the popular pretty girl at school or anything. I was always such a weirdo.

  

  Maisie Williams
  • School
  • Pretty
  • Girl

• You can keep going on and on about the interactions of people, which makes it a great drama and great event, and you'll always hold that special, but if you're looking at a baseball moment, the feeling you get when you win the World Series by far exceeds anything else in the game that you're able to do.

  

  Cal Ripken, Jr.
  • People
  • World
  • Great

• I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.

  

  Sam Shepard
  • Like
  • Busy
  • Cattle

• We must exchange the philosophy of excuse - what I am is beyond my control for the philosophy of responsibility.

  

  Barbara Jordan
  • Control
  • Responsibility
  • Philosophy

• Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

  

  Sam Brownback
  • Human
  • Dimensions
  • Refugees

• No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

  

  Van Wyck Brooks
  • Book
  • House
  • Lost

• I come from a background where money has never been an issue.

  

  Ranbir Kapoor
  • Money
  • Never
  • Where

• Mum is the girliest of them all, but she ended up with me, the tomboy.

  

  Katarina Johnson-Thompson
  • Up
  • She
  • Me

• My parents worked in the art world. They were really supportive of my music in that they allowed me to drop out of school and move out of our home, which not many parents would do.

  

  Ed Sheeran
  • World
  • Music
  • School

• There are competing studies on how much crime drops or doesn't drop when there are strict rules on gun possession and sale. I don't think there's any question that New York City's very tough laws have reduced violence.

  

  Gail Collins
  • City
  • Question
  • Violence

• I don't remember anything from the Bills. It was rough there, but it is what it is. Now I'm here in the Super Bowl, just trying to enjoy that.

  

  Tarvaris Jackson
  • Trying
  • Remember
  • Enjoy

• Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.

  

  Pat Buchanan
  • Great
  • Society
  • Party

• You're not going to do good work if you're not choosing something because it inspires you.

  

  Maggie Gyllenhaal
  • Good
  • Work
  • Good Work

• The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

  

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
  • Principle
  • Grave
  • Suspect

• Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.

  

  Yann Martel
  • Work
  • Music
  • Nature

• I'm a huge David Hockney fan.

  

  Johnny Flynn

• This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

  

  Doris Lessing
  • People
  • Up
  • World