Circumstance

Famous quotes containing the word circumstance:

    “As a general rule, do not kick the shins of the opposite gentleman under the table, if personally unaquainted with him; your pleasantry is liable to be misunderstood—a circumstance at all times unpleasant.”
    —Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)

    “The historian’s job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.”
    —Peter Conrad (b. 1948)

    “The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)