Famous quotes containing the words congress, decline, power, parties, rise and/or popularity:
“I have a Congress on my hands.”
—Grover Cleveland (18371908)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of temperament and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupils individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)