John McWhorter Quotes
As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
Quotes to Explore
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that's 10 women.
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Do you follow American politics? They hate Obama. Hate him. He's a black man. That's what it is: it's racist. This guy is no bleeding-heart liberal. He's a centrist.
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We're going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years - if not longer - to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don't know yet. But we will turn the ship.
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We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
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Salaries and wages must reflect the reality of the enterprise's economic performance; deviations from the planned performance should be reflected in pay.
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I changed that system in Florida when I was the Speaker of the House - I was the Minority Leader; I saw for 16 years the way a power system works.
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Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.
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If you saw pictures of me as a kid, you'd laugh because I was always in football kit.
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With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.
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Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour.
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When I go into the studio, I completely detach. I let my emotions come out.
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We did a lot of those road trips, all the mandatory stuff that you should when you're a kid, like Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon and the Sequoias and the western coast.
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I have a very musical family from my Scottish roots.
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I am a very active audience member. I want to be moved. I want to be confronted. I want to feel.
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Acting has always existed alongside my normal life. It's been a case of learning on the job. I've worked in so many styles, with so many people, so I've picked bits up from everyone and everything.
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You say something, things you would rather forget, and then they are out there. It makes me anxious and I don't know why people are interested in me anyway. If I had my way, I would rather exist in a little hole and not speak to anyone.
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Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.
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The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain's Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn't have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.
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In some ways, that's the story of my season - when I wasn't making big mistakes, I was winning races and being on the podium. And when I made mistakes I was still fourth or fifth, just off the podium.
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Round numbers are always false.
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The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted - and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.
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I didn't really know anything about Romany culture going into this [Glue series]. The one thing that I liked the most about it is that it's so family based. They don't have mothers and fathers in the same way we do. They're really in a community, so parenting is shared between the community.
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As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
