Top 100 Ackerman's Quotes
#1. I grew up with Forrest J. Ackerman's 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' along with a plethora of movie tomes and wanted to write about film with a sense of personality, passion, and humor.
Harry Knowles
#2. There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There's a message there.
Gary Ackerman
#3. It used to be you had real friends on the other side of the aisle. It's not like that anymore. Society has changed. The public is to blame as well. I think the people have gotten dumber.
Gary Ackerman
#4. If we mammals don't get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it's not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I'm just amazed we don't pace and fret about it all the time.
Diane Ackerman
#5. From the U.S. Capitol Building to the White House, our national symbols that represent freedom to so many of us, were built by people who were anything but free.
Gary Ackerman
#6. Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.
Diane Ackerman
#7. Wars have economies. And I don't mean financial economies, although that's often part of it. Why do people continue fighting these wars? There are financial incentives.
Elliot Ackerman
#8. The trend for rewilding our cities is growing. It's positive, it enlightens, it's widespread, and it helps. We need to retrofit and reimagine cities as planet-friendly citadels. They're our hives and reefs. Sea mussels aren't the only animals living in individual shells that are glued together.
Diane Ackerman
#9. One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.
Diane Ackerman
#10. I do feel responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can't. That's so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?' [p. 153]
Diane Ackerman
#11. The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.
Diane Ackerman
#12. So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.
Diane Ackerman
#13. Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?
Diane Ackerman
#14. one legend has it that Jews found Poland attractive because the country's name sounded like the Hebrew imperative po lin ("rest here").
Diane Ackerman
#15. Much more. We're joined at the heart."
"Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky."
"Too much boozing."
His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. "Not enough kissling.
Diane Ackerman
#16. The assassin's bullet: Lee Harvey Oswald created a constitutional space for decisive legislative action, opening a path for Lyndon Johnson to save the civil rights revolution at the cost of destroying the New Deal coalition.
Bruce A. Ackerman
#17. A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.
Diane Ackerman
#18. I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]
Diane Ackerman
#19. She's so sensitive, she's almost able to read their minds. . .. She becomes them. . .. She has a precise and very special gift, a way of observing and understanding animals that's rare, a sixth sense. . .. It's been this way since she was little." In
Diane Ackerman
#20. The ability to convince people of the wackiest notions - and both parties can do it - it's part of the dumbing down of America that's really highly problematic.
Gary Ackerman
#21. Writer's block is a luxury most people with deadlines don't have.
Diane Ackerman
#22. Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.
Diane Ackerman
#23. There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.
Diane Ackerman
#24. We have some Jewish members of Congress, not a lot but there's a bunch of us.
Gary Ackerman
#25. Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.
Diane Ackerman
#26. And it's absolutely hypocritical for the political party that talks about states rights, to suddenly ignore states rights, that say that the federal government or federalism has no business in this kind of business.
Gary Ackerman
#27. The media's gotten lazy. They don't check anything out. You report what he reports.
Gary Ackerman
#28. The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.
Diane Ackerman
#29. It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves, he lamented.
Diane Ackerman
#30. I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
Diane Ackerman
#31. We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.
Diane Ackerman
#32. Susannah." My dance partner's breath was soft against my cheek. "Susannah ... "
Yeah. In my dreams.
In real life, the voice calling my name wasn't a bit masculine. That's because it belonged to a twelve-year-old boy.
Meg Cabot
#33. What sort of stewards of the future planet will today's digital children be?
Diane Ackerman
#34. It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.
Diane Ackerman
#35. Looking forward, it might prove constructive to examine the true historical record of an issue prior to assuming the worst of anyone's motive and deconstructing and questioning anyone's Democratic bona fides. After all, we liberals got feelings.
Gary Ackerman
#36. When you go to war, it's important for everybody to know that they're going to come home in one way or other.
Elliot Ackerman
#37. husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93. Yiddish's
Diane Ackerman
#38. We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.
Diane Ackerman
#39. How can love's spaciousness
be conveyed in the narrow
confines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
#41. Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it's a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.
Diane Ackerman
#42. Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all's-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight ... I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life. [p. 290]
Diane Ackerman
#43. Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.
Diane Ackerman
#44. All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.
Elliot Ackerman
#45. The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one's sanity.
Diane Ackerman
#46. So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
Diane Ackerman
#47. The world is merciless, and it's also very beautiful.
Hajime Isayama
#49. The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
Diane Ackerman
#50. The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother's womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones, and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings.
Diane Ackerman
#51. Imagining Janet Albright, Matt Kensington's terrifying admin, and Max Ackerman, his limo driver, as a couple wasn't as unlikely a vision as he'd expected. In fact, it might be a mighty interesting combination. 'Course, an explosion was interesting-if you wer outside the blast zone.
Joey W. Hill
#52. People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.
Diane Ackerman
#53. Politics was my third act. But I could have a fourth. I don't know what that will be yet, but there will be one.
Gary Ackerman
#54. Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.
Diane Ackerman
#55. Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman
#56. A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most - be it sweetheart or flower - looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance. While
Diane Ackerman
#57. I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I'm observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding a little better what being human is.
Diane Ackerman
#58. What do those of us who aren't tall, flawlessly sculpted adolescents do?
Answer: Console ourselves with how relative beauty can be ...
Thank heavens for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence,
wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent and grace.
Diane Ackerman
#59. It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology. On
Diane Ackerman
#60. As a state senator and then a congressman, I've had the privilege of trying to do good things for people to whom I owe so much and can never fully repay.
Gary Ackerman
#62. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Diane Ackerman
#63. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
Diane Ackerman
#64. Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
Diane Ackerman
#65. Habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.
Diane Ackerman
#66. Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.
Diane Ackerman
#67. Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Diane Ackerman
#68. What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Diane Ackerman
#69. Although Mengele's subjects could be operated on without any painkillers at all, a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.
Diane Ackerman
#70. [On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.
Diane Ackerman
#71. A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman
#72. Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.
Diane Ackerman
#73. Love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.
Diane Ackerman
#74. Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane Ackerman
#75. Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move.
Diane Ackerman
#77. Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
Diane Ackerman
#79. American writer
1803-1882
Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.
Diane Ackerman
#80. God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made - to our peril.
Diane Ackerman
#81. Whether rich people make money or lose money, they get no sympathy from the public.
Gary Ackerman
#82. Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
Diane Ackerman
#83. The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
Diane Ackerman
#85. I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
Diane Ackerman
#86. There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It ... gives the brain a small vacation.
Diane Ackerman
#87. No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
Diane Ackerman
#88. It's so acceptably easy for a woman not to strive too hard, not to be too adventure-crazed, not to take too many risks, not to enjoy sex with full candor ... It isn't seemly for a woman to have that much zest.
Diane Ackerman
#89. I've had meetings with Fidel Castro. I've had meetings with Kim Il-Sung. I've had meetings with other dictators. I've met with the Butcher of Beijing. You know, I think it's important to hear, you know, each other's perspective.
Gary Ackerman
#90. Become the healthiest person you can be. Refuse to tolerate unhealthy behaviors in your relationships,
Robert J. Ackerman
#91. If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk.
Gary Ackerman
#92. Not much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane Ackerman
#93. Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I'm stricken
by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain
everythingness of everything, in cahoots
with the everythingness of everything else.
- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)
Diane Ackerman
#95. We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
Diane Ackerman
#97. Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed.
Diane Ackerman
#98. Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.
Diane Ackerman
#99. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
Diane Ackerman
#100. Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.
Diane Ackerman
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