Sébastien-Roch Nicolas (Nicolas Chamfort) Quotes
Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!
Quotes to Explore
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The long irons are the nemesis of the average golfer. I'm convinced that the underlying reason for this is that he keeps hearing how hard they are to handle. They're not that difficult, truly.
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What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.
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The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.
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I don't like running when I'm holding things in my hand, whether it's a dog leash or a baby jogger. My mechanics get all messed up.
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Stereotypical vegetarian food looks gray and brown.
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In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.
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Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
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I had no real idea I was going to become a writer. It was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining.
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I never thought about being famous.
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Angela Bassett is a friend of mine and someone who I truly admire tremendously in terms of her work and her choices.
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I have my cousin's jacket from when he was at war in Iraq. He never came home. It's incredible to have something that is so personal but that I also feel relatively comfortable wearing.
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Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
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Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
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Can't step from one movie set to the next. Only Samuel L. Jackson can do that. All us mere mortals can't do that!
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When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question.
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Like those itinerant clerics who traveled during the summer months and took over for vacationing priests, I hope to help out this summer in Provincetown, but without the pedophilia.
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The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day
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Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.
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Of all literary exercitations, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom.
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After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
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If we’re going to have arguments, let’s have arguments — but let’s make them debates worthy of this body and worthy of this country.
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I have great expectations for our company; pretzels were just the beginning.
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I was for Gore. I thought that Gore and the Democrats were pretty clueless as to what Nader and the Greens represented, and they acted like bullies.
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Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!
