Arika Okrent Quotes
The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
Quotes to Explore
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The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
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Antonio Berardi is one of my good friends.
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I never had crushes on anybody when I was younger; I really didn't.
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Afghanistan has moved forward and Afghanistan will defend itself. And the progress that we have achieved, the Afghan people will not allow it to be put back or reversed.
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But I think boys ultimately are easier than girls.
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I tend to like simple music. And clever, succinct lyrics. Songs that don't try to be more than they need to to be effective, to stir up something emotionally within you.
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Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.
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Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
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I graduated from the University of Oklahoma, and I got the opportunity to take some on-camera classes while I was in school and met a casting director who informed me quite a bit before my move out to L.A.; it made L.A. feel possible, coming from Oklahoma and not having a family that was in the industry.
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I'm proud of my sexuality.
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You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
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I wrote a lot of 'Red Queen' wrapped in a blanket, cramped up while watching the snow come down.
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American literature has always been immigrant.
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For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.
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The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.
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But I won't work with the exact same crew film after film because I feel the work would get a little complacent.
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But no nation can base its survival and development on luck and prayers alone while its leadership fritters away every available opportunity for success and concrete achievement.
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KRS One and LL Cool J are the biggest influences in my rap career, along with Heavy D.
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Making sense of a political moment when you're in the midst of it is difficult: even if you avoid commercial and personal conflicts, it can still be hard to see it and understand it.
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Writing-wise, I started when I was 17. Whatever was bothering me, I could just write about it in a song. I was in the west suburbs of Chicago, then I moved an hour south, and then I went to school up on the South Side - Saint Xavier, though I was at Purdue for a second before I dropped out.
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The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.
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I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.
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It's not my job to dream your dreams. It's my job to make your dreams become a reality.
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The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
