Firsts Quotes - Page 319

I always say, 'If you can't give a reason for the banana peel being in the alley, then don't have the comic slide over it.' Do you understand what I mean? First explain how the banana peel got there quickly. And then there's a reason for all the comedy.

If you're a serious actor, you wouldn't put yourself up for one of those shows in case you got bumped off the first week and all your colleagues saw it.

"Evita" obviously would always be very special to me because it was the first major musical that I did on stage and created in the U.K. with Hal Prince directing.

I like to look at the interface between words and pictures and wonder about which comes first, a sort of chicken-or-egg type of question.

The first gold medal we had won for the Soviet Union. This one we won for each other.

For death, Now I know, is that first breath Which our souls draw when we enter Life, which is of all life center.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.

If there is a well thought-out design standard, it should be followed. In practice, great design comes from great designers. That is empirically the case. If a great designer did a first-rate standard, that model should be followed. Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.

Sometimes things can go right only by first going very wrong.

If not for me, the H-bomb would have been developed in Russia first. In the U.S., we'd now be speaking Russian.

The problem is when [the state] monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there's a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.

I've been involved in and out of the UN for many years - in fact my first internship was in 1971, so it goes back a couple of years!

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

There was a young lady named Mae Who smoked without stopping all day; As pack followed pack, Her lungs first turned black, And eventually rotted away.

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.

Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,From the first point of his appointed sourse,And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them." Mark Twain "...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

Somebody scoffed, Oh, you'll never to that - At least no one ever has done it; But he took off his coat and he took off his hat, And the first thing we knew, he'd begun it.