Quotes by Public Speakers

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
Malcolm Gladwell
I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not.
Fran Lebowitz
Success didn't spoil me I've always been insufferable.
Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
There is no such thing as inner peace there is only nervousness and death.
Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
There is no such thing as inner peace there is only nervousness and death.
Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
Fran Lebowitz
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
Fran Lebowitz
London: A place you go to get bronchitis.
Fran Lebowitz
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he is buying.
Fran Lebowitz
Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
Fran Lebowitz
Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
Malcolm Gladwell
Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.
Brené Brown
With "gay marriage," the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
Orson Scott Card
Occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.
Hilary Clinton
Eko brushed a tear from her eye, and Immo jeered at her, but father held up a hand. "Never mock a tender heart," he said.
Orson Scott Card
I can see by your face that I'll never persuade you. And that's surprising, because usually you at least try to see my side."I can see your side," said Cecily. "I've got a much clearer view of it than you do, from over here on my side.
Orson Scott Card
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Malcolm Gladwell
As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
Fran Lebowitz
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm Gladwell
He was not prepared to deal with my mistake, thought Jane, and he did not understand the suffering his response would cause me. He is innocent of wrong -doing, and so am I. We shall forgive each other and go on. It was a good decision, and Jane was proud of it. The trouble was, she couldn't carry it out. Those few seconds in which parts of her mind came to a halt were not trivial in their effect on her. There was trauma, loss, change; she was not now the same being that she had been before. parts of her had died. Parts of her had become confused, out of order...She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.
Orson Scott Card
We are wise to be cautious, but I suggest we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Orson Scott Card
There are literally a million ways to deal with any situation and Madiba was the best teacher in tutoring me to see those ways, but lying was never an option.
Zelda la Grange
Serpentining" means trying to control a situation, backing out of it, pretending it's not happening, or maybe even pretending that you don't care. We use it to dodge conflict, discomfort, possible confrontation, the potential for shame or hurt, and/or criticism (self- or other-inflicted). Serpentining can lead to hiding out, pretending, avoidance, procrastination, rationalizing, blaming, and lying.I have a tendency to want to serpentine when I feel vulnerable. If I have to make a difficult call, I'll try to script both sides of it. I'll convince myself that I should wait, I'll draft an e-mail while telling myself that it's better in writing, and I'll think of a million other things to do. I'll emotionally run back and forth until I'm exhausted.
Brené Brown
Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.
Orson Scott Card
Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Brené Brown
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
Malcolm Gladwell
...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.
Malcolm Gladwell
Be a Mother who is committed to loving her children into standing on higher ground than the enviroment surrounding them. Mothers are endowed with a love that is unlike any other love on the face of the earth.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.
Orson Scott Card
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
Orson Scott Card
I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
Orson Scott Card
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
Donald Miller
I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.
Donald Miller
That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.
Orson Scott Card
Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
Donald Miller
Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
Orson Scott Card
Most people hate successful people for their small little faults rather than appreciating them for their great strengths.
Awdhesh Singh
Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
Brené Brown
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Brené Brown
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
Fran Lebowitz
If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.
Orson Scott Card
A minor request," said Mazer. "Let's not refer to it as the training cage. 'Training' sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let's call it the Battle Room.
Orson Scott Card
My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants.
Orson Scott Card
To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.
Orson Scott Card
Issib wasn't thrilled to see him. I'm busy and don't need interruptions." "This is the household library," said Nafai. "This is where we always come to do research." "See? You're interrupting already." "Look, I didn't say anything, I just came in here, and you started picking at me the second I walked in the door." "I was hoping you'd walk back out." "I can't. Mother sent me here." Nafai walked over behind Issib, who was floating comfortably in the air in front of his computer display. It was layered thirty pages deep, but each page had only a few words on it, so he could see almost everything at once. Like a game of solitaire, in which Issib was simply moving fragments from place to place. The fragments were all words in weird languages. The ones Nafai recognized were very old. "What language is that?" Nafai asked pointing, to one. Issib signed. "I'm so glad you're not interrupting me." "What is it, some ancient form of Vijati?" "Very good. It's Slucajan, which came from Obilazati, the original form of Vijati. It's dead now." "I read Vijati, you know." "I don't." "Oh, so you're specializing in ancient, obscure languages that nobody speaks anymore, including you?" "I'm not learning these languages, I'm researching lost words." "If the whole language is dead, then all the words are lost." "Words that used to have meanings, but that died out or survived only in idiomatic expressions. Like 'dancing bear.' What's a bear, do you know?" "I don't know. I always thought it was some kind of graceful bird." "Wrong. It's an ancient mammal. Known only on Earth, I think, and not brought here. Or it died out soon. It was bigger than a man, very powerful. A predator." "And it danced?" "The expression used to mean something absurdly clumsy. Like a dog walking on its hind legs." "And now it means the opposite. That's weird. How could it change?" "Because there aren't any bears. THe meaning used to be obvious, because everybody knew a bear and how clumsy it would look, dancing. But when the bears were gone, the meaning could go anywhere. Now we use it for a person who's extremely deft in getting out of an embarrassing social situation. It's the only case that we use the word bear anymore. And you see a lot of people misspelling it, too." "Great stuff. You doing a linguistics project?" "No." "What's this for, then?" "Me." "Just collection old idioms?" "Lost words." "Like bear? The word isn't lost, Issya. It's the bears that are gone." "Very good, Nyef. You get full credit for the assignment. Go away now.
Orson Scott Card
I want to live my life to its fullest potential. I want to embrace my own purpose, however large or small it may be. I want to find my own Nehru moments and take positive steps toward becoming the person I am meant to be. The journey will undoubtedly be a winding one, filled with surprises and setbacks as well as gifts. But I'm ready to embrace it fully, wherever it may take me.
Mallika Chopra
Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.
Orson Scott Card
It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around.
Orson Scott Card
The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.
Orson Scott Card
Isn’t it amazing, amazing, amazing that something so specific can be so resonant? These are the filaments, filaments, filaments from that Walt Whitman poem. It makes me think that the thoughts that I have in my head that make me feel the most lonely because I don’t think anyone else thinks them, are also the thoughts that have the most potential that make me feel connected. I just have to get them out some how gossamer thread.
Ze Frank
What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.
Orson Scott Card
In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
Malcolm Gladwell
Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. ... [Dr. Freireich] understood from his own childhood experiences that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.
Malcolm Gladwell
In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.
Malcolm Gladwell
Imagine learning at such a young age that your very appearance—your very identity—is enough to trigger such confusion and animosity. Imagine knowing that people will hate you for no reason other than you are who you are
Thomas Beatie
Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture," once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. "Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear" (p.251).
Malcolm Gladwell