Jack Abbott
Jack Abbott

Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.

Jack Abbott
Jack Abbott

I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

Randa Abdel-Fattah
Randa Abdel-Fattah

The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the

oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood.

Daayiee Abdullah
Daayiee Abdullah

Nowhere in the Quran does it say punish homosexuals. And historians have also never found any case of the Prophet Muhammad dealing with homosexuality.

M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams

If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams

I've always been surprised at the degree of success of The Mirror and the Lamp and the range and duration of esteem for it. … I had no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specialized group interested in literary criticism. I think one of the reasons why it's been of interest to a broad spectrum of readers is because one of its emphases was on the role of metaphors in

steering human thinking. It was a very early book to insist on the role of metaphors in cognition, as well as in imaginative literature — to claim that key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions. … Natural Supernaturalism is quite well known and even used as a textbook, but it never seems to have attracted the acclaim of its predecessor.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

We can never be certain about the future and therefore we must continue to be flexible and adaptable so that we can react quickly to the needs of our clients and our market place.

Dean Acheson
Dean Acheson

In the State Department, one never lacks for helpful suggestions.

Dean Acheson
Dean Acheson

No change (Marshall replacing former SecDef. Louis Johnson, who, soon after he resigned, was diagnosed with a fatal "brain malady") could have been more welcome to me. It brought only one embarrassment. The General (Marshall) insisted, overruling every protest of mine, in meticulously observing the protocol involved in my being the senior Cabinet officer. Never would he go through a door before

me, or walk anywhere but on my left; he would go around an automobile to enter it after me and sit on the left; in meetings he would insist on my speaking before him. To be treated so by a revered and beloved former chief was a harrowing experience. But the result in government was, I think, unique in the history of the Republic. For the first time and perhaps, though I am not sure, the last, the

Secretaries of State and Defense, with their top advisors, met with the Chiefs of Staff in their map room and discussed common problems together. At one of these meetings General Bradley and I made a treaty, thereafter scrupulously observed. The phrases 'from a military point of view' and 'from a political point of view' were excluded from our talks. No such dichotomy existed. Each of us had our

tactical and strategic problems, but they were interconnected, not separate.

Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa
Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa

How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.