Ambrose Bierce Quotes
A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.
Quotes to Explore
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You find out your mistakes from an audience that pays admission.
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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
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When my lady and I sit down and watch TV, I find she gets annoyed at characters because they don't do what she would do in the situation. I'm always like, 'Well, she has to do that because that's what the story is.'
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Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
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The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
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It's all part of my journey - I've done a lot of stupid things, but you learn by your mistakes.
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I don't want anybody to dictate to America how to decide our lives.
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The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
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Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass - you don't see it, but somehow it does something.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
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I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.
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Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.
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I grew up in Hollywood during WWII, and my mother was afraid that my father was going to be drafted because she didn't think we were going to be able to live on army pay. She didn't want to have to get a job, so she decided to put me to work, and that's how I got started in the movies.
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To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.
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Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.
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If I'm saying a universal truth, but maybe it's something that people don't feel comfortable saying... It's a strange take, but at the same time, what you're hitting on is kind of right. You can relate. That's the heart of comedy. You have to have a point of view. You gotta commit. And the more you commit to it, sometimes the funnier it gets.
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I have never gotten a B in my life. I would honestly be mortified if I got a B. I'm so academically driven.
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When I started playing in bands, we had to be apologetic for what we did. We had to be apologetic because the mainstream was so bad.
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You are forced to have the best data capture, the best information, when you have goods in hundreds of factories around the world, and the question is: 'Where is everything?' And how do you bring it all together?
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A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
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We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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The internal and international criminal gang will either be forced to work or simply exterminated.
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A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.
