Melanie > Melanie's Quotes

“People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.”
― Greg Gutfeld, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage

“Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts.”
― Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

“A funny thing about tolerant people? They're really only tolerant when you agree with them.”
― Greg Gutfeld, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage

“Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“In the fight for freedom, the Internet is everything, and we should fight to protect it from government encroachment and censorship.”
― Matt Kibbe, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto

“Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Like Ronald Reagan in 1976, today we may have to beat the Republicans before we can beat the Democrats.”
― Matt Kibbe, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto

“What if the new political spectrum has on one side those people who want to be left alone, those who want to be free, those who don't hurt people or take their stuff, and on the other extreme of this new scale stands anyone who wants to use government power to tell you how to live your life?”
― Matt Kibbe, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto

“Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project-- say, a book-- but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Our childhood is too brief to fill it with activities that stifle our spirit and rob our joy.”
― Richard Blackaby, Customized Parenting in a Trending World

“If they were honest, many parents would confess that their primary reasons for not allowing their child to quit something is because of financial reasons, or personal reluctance to get involved, or both.”
― Richard Blackaby, Customized Parenting in a Trending World

“The others laughed and Burt said, "All you need are girls who paddle like boys, and you're set!”
― Carolyn Keene (Mildred Wirt Benson), The Secret of the Golden Pavilion

“Sure, cried the tenant men,but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours….That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it."

"We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man."

"Yes, but the bank is only made of men."

"No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I've had to wonder if people like Shina and other spawns of third world immigrants have felt the need to purchase so much expensive couture in order to feel acceptable and insulated enough in (white) American upper-class society. But why purchase so much costly shit when you're not even that rich or ever going to wear half of what your husband has had to pay for anyway? At least more upper-class white women in America have had better things to spend their money on, like Botox, fillers, and online dating sites.”
― Jean Bergman

“When we operate from the central concern of being seen a certain way, we can't develop healthy relationships in the messy soil of reality-- the only place they'll grow. Presenting a perfect, fake life to others generates fear in our own hearts and intimidation in everyone else's, and creates nice, fake relationships-- with our friends, with our family members, even with our own children.”
― Jen Hatmaker

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
― Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people's children.”
― Andy Miller

“Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it's the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.”
― Peter Thiel

“By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.”
― Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1832

“The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.”
― Carl von Clausewitz, On War

“Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world's envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge of research and attract talent from around the globe. We also have a plenitude and variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled. In light of that, the process of applying to college should and could be about ecstatically rummaging through those possibilities and feeling energized, even elated, by them. But for too many students, it's not, and financial constraints aren't the only reason. Failures of boldness and imagination by both students and parents bear some blame. The information is all out there. You just have to look.”
― Frank Bruni

“When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.”
― M.T. Anderson, Feed