George F. Kennan Quotes
The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.
Quotes to Explore
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I do not often get lonely, and I never get bored.
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Winning is great, but being able to finish my last Olympic Games on American soil was very important. Even though I was injured, I didn't let my psyche get the best of me and cause me to doubt myself, so I was willing to pull every muscle in my body in '96 in order to get the job done and I came away with the bronze medal.
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I believe nuclear energy in Jordan will be done in such a way where it is a public-private partnership so everyone can see exactly what's going on.
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If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.
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The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.
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I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.
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One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.
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The American Dream is that any man or woman, despite of his or her background, can change their circumstances and rise as high as they are willing to work.
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An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.
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I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
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I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
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Honestly, with me, as long as I have a park to play basketball in, I'm pretty cool.
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The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.
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So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!
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The American system of democracy is founded on the concept that every citizen has the right to vote, to know that their vote is counted, and that the vote is counted accurately.
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Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.
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The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.
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I am emphatically against the privatization of Social Security. It is going to hurt millions of American women, American families and ultimately the whole country.
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It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.
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If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.
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I'm a classic example of what can happen if you follow your inner voice. I was cursed with interests and some talent in many different areas. It confuses people.
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Just as I know the usual rules of law enforcement, I also know the exceptions and invoke those frequently. I don't feel a need to bog the reader down with an explanation of why the procedures are realistic, as long as I know that there is, in fact, an explanation.
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The degree of polarization that currently exists in Washington is such where I think it's fair to say if I presented a cure for cancer, getting legislation passed to move that forward would be a nail-biter.
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The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.
