Alain de Botton Quotes
Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable-yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating-than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Quotes to Explore
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I like everything perfect. Everything has to be neat. My sister is 5, and she's more messy than I am. I make my bed every morning, everything's perfect. My shoes are all arranged. It's sad. I'm a little like Ray, a little bit.
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Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
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All my life, the naysayers have told me that I can't win because I'm a progressive... because I'm a woman... even because I'm a lesbian.
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I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.
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The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
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You have no ability, if you're a financial institution and you're threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.
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I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?
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I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear.
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The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.
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A new era of responsibility is here.
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A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
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Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.
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Utah's economy stays strong by adhering to conservative fundamental principles: low and consistent tax rates, smaller and more efficient government, sensible regulation, and empowering the private sector to create jobs.
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It's not healthy to be jealous.
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Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.
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There can be a lot of mind games going on between the players. When you're about to serve, people will try to throw you off your rhythm by taking a walk. If you're tired, you can't show that at all to an opponent.
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I think that most people who hire me to do a remix just want it to work in a nightclub, whereas when I'm writing my own album, I don't have to worry so much about 2 A.M.
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I have a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We've come to take our government back.
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I see my life flashing before me when I see people in the audience singing along to something I wrote in the '80s, and they're maybe standing next to someone who knows the more recent stuff.
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The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.
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The main thing in life is not to be afraid of being human.
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I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.
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I guess it really didn't even dawn on me that you could be a rock critic as a job until I was maybe almost out of college. I knew criticism existed. I read Rolling Stone and Spin. Siskel and Ebert were on television. But I had absolutely no idea how to get that kind of life. And moreover, it didn't interest me that much. I just sort of read normal books growing up. I wasn't that media-conscious. I felt like the one thing I was able to do was to listen to a record and decide whether I liked it.
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Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable-yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating-than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
