In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.
A. N. Wilson
The notion of having your muse was not something that was built for women originally. That's not to say women don't have muses. I get muses in terms of actors or writers who inspire me, so I understand the concept.
Abi Morgan
I haven't read the 'Twilight' books, though I suppose, in general, I thought it might be fun to deflate all of the notions of vampire sexiness, secret societies, the idea that anyone could learn to divide the population of the world between fellow vampires and perishable food sources and expect to retain their humanity, etc.
Adam Rex
We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.
Adlai Stevenson I
'Luke Cage' came out in 1972 at the height of the blaxploitation era. It was a literary response to this notion of blaxploitation movies. It was the first time in American culture that Hollywood was embracing black movies.
Adrian Younge
That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they're always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that's just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.
Adrienne Mayor
It's such a big deal, the notion that these enslaved Africans had marriages and children... because therein lies our humanity, our capacity for love.
Aja Naomi King
I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.
Al Jarreau
Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.
Alan Dundes
A lot of preconceived notions that I had about fame and status and money and joy and pain, and all of these things that I thought I knew, I didn't.
Alanis Morissette
We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.
Alberto Manguel
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
Time starts out as a notion. But after you turn fifty, time is not a notion anymore but a fact that you start feeling clearly, and in a way, it pushes you to become present in the present.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
All my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.
The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.
Alex Berenson
If I only acted, I feel like I wouldn't have enough creative expression over my own sensibility, and also if I only acted, the notion of surrendering my fate and future to other people is deeply unsettling to me and it would make me uncomfortable.
Alex Karpovsky
Wen wu contradicts the very American notion of John Wayne being the ideal of manhood. In the wen wu way of thinking, it's much more important to restrain rather than exert yourself through brute power.
Alex Tizon
I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable. That people from Asia were weak, they were small in all ways - including physically small, geopolitically small, economically small - all of which are changing, of course.
American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop culture, are very superficial, one-dimensional, and adolescent.
Oh! this opponent, this collaborator against your will, whose notion of beauty always differs from yours and whose means are often too limited for active assistance to your intentions!
Alexander Alekhine
There's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second.
I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
I have this strange notion that clothes should be fun.
It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
The common Notions of Liberty are not from School Divines, but from Nature.
It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity... my children aren't buying it.
It is easy to gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source - the inventories of the estates of the colonists.
We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
It was important for me as a theater artist to allow myself and my interests to evolve over time and allow my notion of what success meant to evolve over time. I've always had a day job and never been just acting. But it didn't make me feel like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
People have a preconceived notion about who I am and it's interesting. It's like picking who you want to win for the Oscars and not seeing the movie. Before you make a statement about someone, get all the information and see everything before you make a judgment.
Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your shared biases, or your prejudice. How to do the opposite? To create a sense of the real and then challenge your biases. I think that is my favourite aspect of writing, and that is what I've tried to do in 'The Lovers.'
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.
Somewhere along the line, positive thinking seems to have been confused with magical thinking. There's a notion that if you think positively enough, you can make anything happen by using the power of your mind. All the positive thinking in the world won't deliver good fortune or prevent tragedy from striking.
I think of myself as a fairly attractive girl and always have, thanks to my mom. I was brought into this world thinking I was gorgeous because my mother was extremely devoted to this notion.
I have many reasons why I think reading is really important. It provided for me a refuge, especially during difficult times. It provided me with the notion that I could find an ending that was different from what was happening to me at the time.
I do sort of question the notion that conservatives should try and turn America into a place where people can come from traditional societies and continue to be fully traditional in every sense.
We still have to overcome the notion that a clarinet squeaks. People need to remember what a beautiful instrument it is, including in popular music.
I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away - the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don't buy it.
My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.
When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain.
Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.
The English, in their ignorance, still have the romantic notion that Scottish schools are superior to English ones; they are at least a generation out of date.
'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.
We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
