George Vaillant Quotes
Life ain't easy. Terrible things happen to everyone. You have to keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends who are younger than you, learn new things, and have fun.
Quotes to Explore
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When I read, I take notes and underline things. So reading is a vigorous process for me, but I read in bed. My poor husband is trying to go to sleep, and I'm reaching over him to get the Post-it notes.
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Genius always finds itself a century too early.
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Black women as a group have never been fools. We couldn't afford to be.
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Sometimes you have to be okay with what you are to the world, where you are in the world, and make the most of it.
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My parents said marrying was an optimistic thing to do in pessimistic times.
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I don't like the word 'balance.' To me, that somehow conjures up conflict between work and family... as long as we think of these things as conflicting, we will never have happiness. True happiness comes from integration... of work, family, self, community.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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You have people who can't act and they get all these parts. Paris Hilton falls into her own category. She's made a career out of it.
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President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.
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People can't really place me. They're not really sure who I am.
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We weren't One Hit Wonders. We had a few hits.
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I'm a clown, which could be a public health role. I'm really interested in moving our society away from a society needing Xanax and Prozac, and that is really feeling depressed, to one that is celebrating, and so I find just walking around in colorful clothes, people smile.
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Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
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We were too young to know better, and none of us were very aggressive people. It would have helped a lot if just one of us had been aggressive enough to say no.
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What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
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There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans - not as Democrats or Republicans-we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
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Women are very powerful! That's why I believe in women's rights and why I fight for it.
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In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.
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Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion. While nothing is so foolish and baseless.
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If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
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There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.
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Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
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Life ain't easy. Terrible things happen to everyone. You have to keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends who are younger than you, learn new things, and have fun.
