Alexander McCall Smith Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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There are lots of people who haven't been to drama school who have great talent and can be discovered.
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Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.
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If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
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A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
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To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.
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It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
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We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society.
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A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.
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We must honestly face our relationship with Great Britain.
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Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.
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Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.
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Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.
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Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
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I love who I am and I love my life, but if I could be someone else, I'd be Beyonce in two seconds.
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When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality and, yes, vanity of the notion.
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I buy when other people are selling.
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My mom would always play me a lot of late-'50s, late-'60s rock.
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My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.
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I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.
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Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does 'culture' become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.
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When the founder of World Energy Solutions Inc. assembled his first board in 2000, it consisted of nine investors and friends. The group met quarterly, generally affirming Domaleski's every action. But the Worcester, Mass., company, which auctions electricity and gas credits, lacked customers and financing. It needed more from its board to survive.
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The world has not been hindered in its progress, but immensely aided in it, by England.
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Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?
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We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
