John Betjeman Quotes
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
Quotes to Explore
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I had eleven varsity letters. I loved basketball the best, but cross-country is a little more under your control.
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The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.
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Sometimes a chord on a guitar will somehow spur some thought in your head, and you will write a song about it.
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I am cursed with computers; something always goes wrong.
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I always drive like a madman.
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The biggest rival I had in my career was me. I couldn't control Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson or Lee Trevino. The only person I could control was me.
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There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, 'look!'
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We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
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Especially in the day and age now with social media and cameraphones and things like that, you always have to act like you're being watched.
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When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.
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If there is one thing that makes me unique, it's that I riff a lot.
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I was assigned to the heavy cruiser Chicago.
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By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
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Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.
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Well, it's taken a long time to get the Department of Homeland Security established. It's taken a long time for the Congress to decide how much it wanted to fund.
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The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
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We all know him: everybody has an Archie Bunker in their family, so you love to laugh at him, and you never take it personally; everybody just has a ball laughing at him.
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Defeating racism, tribalism, intolerance and all forms of discrimination will liberate us all, victim and perpetrator alike.
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Two records put me over the top with hip-hop. One of them was 'Planet Rock,' and the other had no lyrics – it was called 'Numbers,' from a group called Kraftwerk. Every kid in the 'hood in New York and New Jersey was popping, locking, and breaking to that record. It was the hottest track on the street at the time.
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I have this nightmare that one day I will have to look at every picture I've ever taken with people in an airport or in bars or restaurants, and it will make me very sad.
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To love in any way is to be like a child—it means to be vulnerable, to be wide-eyed, to be selfless. There is no such thing as free love; love is the most costly expression in the world. To love romantically is to give of oneself fully and completely, a merging and meshing of souls so that the twain become a unity. It is to allow the sense of wonder to fully enrapture.
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When we started off, we wanted the girls, the cocaine, the fur coats. It wasn't like it was an act; it was almost like working-class people winning the pools. We went bananas.
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... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.
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Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
