Amin Maalouf Quotes
During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
Quotes to Explore
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I spend an extraordinary amount of time in my car, so I can justify the expense. That's the only extravagance in my life - it's my car.
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Seeing people who are actually reading your book and listening to the wide variety of reactions they have to it, is really special.
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I am what I am and I'm a horrible liar. I can't do it. I'm just very candid.
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I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.
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Through love one acquires renunciation and discrimination naturally.
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Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
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Any organization or any individual that targets civilians and kills them for political agenda is a terrorist organization.
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Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.
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It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
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Quiet is the new loud.
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If you calculate 15 minutes a day to shave, that is 5,000 minutes a year spent shaving.
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I live in a bus and go from place to place and sometimes feel very detached from what's going on.
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No person is just one particular emotion.
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A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
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No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.
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The problem with forbearance is that it always looks like a good thing to do until it stops working.
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I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down-the truth is much more bizarre.
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If there is a pattern, it will come back - maybe in Russia more than anywhere else, because it has collapsed so many times. Maybe less so here in the States, because here the society is so young.
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I've always tried to be fair, even-handed, not an advocate for any group.
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I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don't get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.
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The skills and productivity of American Workers, not to mention the taxes they pay, are the greatest economic resource our country has. To condemn large numbers of them to unemployment, to deprive the Treasury of their tax contributions and to force them to live on unemployment at public expense is the most expensive luxury any society ever chose to buy.
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Leadership experts and the public alike extol the virtues of transformational leaders - those who set out bold objectives and take risks to change the world. We tend to downplay 'transactional' leaders, whose goals are more modest, as mere managers.
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Wherever I've been, and I've been to over 20, maybe 25, countries in Africa, I've noticed how their backbone is broken. They don't have any confidence in themselves. They always think a white man will solve their problems from outside for them.
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During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.
