Top 100 Could Have Quotes
#1. There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical.
Robert Bourassa
#2. I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
Mark Twain
#3. If the Founding Fathers could have looked into a crystal ball and seen AK-47s and Glock semi-automatic pistols, I think they would say, you know, 'That's not really what we mean when we say bear arms.'
Michael Moore
#4. 'It would be great not to have to deal with any of this. When I found out, I wished Killian could have wiped my memories so I wouldn't have to know that all this shit exists. I was like, "Vampires can get rid of memories. What are you good for?" But it is what it is.'
Tara Lain
#5. My dad's a journalist, and he travelled a lot when I was young. There is no way my mother could have done that.
Raquel Cassidy
#6. Closure. Such an odd concept. Did relationships really need it? Or was it just an excuse for one last glimpse at what could have been?
Alessandra Torre
#7. I wouldn't be a very good hunter without these glasses. I'm not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I'd be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection.
Carl Zimmer
#8. I wish I could have one without the other, but that's the problem with being alive. You don't usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.
Ally Condie
#9. I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.
Tracy Spiridakos
#10. If we could have but one generation of properly born, trained, educated, and healthy children, a thousand other problems of government would vanish.
Herbert Hoover
#11. There are certain TV shows that probably would have made me rich, and there are certain commitments I could have made that probably would have raised a lot of eyebrows that I didn't. But I don't look back at those decisions and say, 'Oh God, I'm such an idiot.'
Josh Gad
#12. Maybe if you had focused a little more in school, you could have gotten some scholar..." "No!" Owen shouts, plugging his ears. "How dare you speak that word in my presence?" "What word?" Liam asks with a chuckle. He raises his voice purposefully. "Scholarships?
Loretta Lost
#13. Any candidate who'd offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon - someone with a different concept of the presidency - could have challenged him and come very close to beating him.
Hunter S. Thompson
#14. When I was told they wanted the show to be about doctors, I was a bit reluctant to sign on, you know? I thought, why have a show about doctors when we could have a show about the real heroes, you know, like me?
Zach Braff
#15. If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.
Nancy Mairs
#16. You could have everything right but be in the wrong place. You think your business is no good, but really, the problem is your place is no good.
Fred DeLuca
#17. We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.
Charles Francis Richter
#18. Ray did not but could have said, *quote*Me, I read books [ ... ] How's about you?*closequote*
Raymond Federman
#19. I couldn't stay in that room with both men one more minute ...
Even a human woman could have drowned in the testosterone in the air, it was so strong.
Patricia Briggs
#20. If only I had objected harder, or ordered him or something. It could have been different. It should have been different. None of this was meant to happen this way ...
Steve Merrick
#21. Oh, well, that's not bad, I suppose. I mean, I'd prefer devastatingly sophisticated - but almost endearing is more than I could have hoped for under the circumstances.
Jane Costello
#22. For TV I don't think I could have gotten a better part than Uncle Junior because of the intimacy of the character based on David Chase's brilliant writing.
Dominic Chianese
#23. I can't understand how she could have wanted to live back here, away from everything," said Jane. "Oh, I can easily understand that," said Anne thoughtfully. "I wouldn't want it myself for a steady thing because, although I love the fields and woods, I love people too ...
L.M. Montgomery
#24. Hearing it, I wonder how I could have ever thought that the birdcall I heard earlier sounded anything like the Officer's whistle.
Ally Condie
#25. She could have just told him about the magic phone. Full disclosure. Then they could have solved it together. They could have Sherlocked and Watsoned from both ends of the timeline
Rainbow Rowell
#26. If you suffer misfortune ... do you damnedest to ignore it. Wallowing in what-might-have-beens and what-could have-happeneds will only keep your emotional wounds festering.
Shelly Branch
#27. Tell the truth, all Sicilians prefer smelling the shit of their villages to the best perfumes in Paris. What am I doing here? I could have escaped to Brazil like some others. Ah, we love where we are born, we Sicilians, but Sicily does not love us.
Mario Puzo
#28. If I could have one superpower, I'd want to have the power of mind over matter. I'd want to be able to move things and people with my mind.
Shaun Alexander
#29. Part of me felt mollified by the letter, though another part felt he still could have been a bit more tactful in his earlier treatment, busy or no. The rest of me pointed out that all of these "parts of me" probably should be in therapy.
Richelle Mead
#30. If I'd known things would end this way, we could have gone and done all that stuff instead of making excuses about my job, about how your mother couldn't spare the time,
Banana Yoshimoto
#31. I used to be good at clothes shopping and whatnot - at least ,I think I was! - but at some point after two kids and a career that worked out better than I ever could have imagined, I looked up from my desk and realized that I wore the same three t-shirts and 15-year-old jeans every day.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#32. Canada has become trouble recently ... It's always the worst Americans who go there ... We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They're the only good parts of Canada.
Ann Coulter
#33. Debbie had to get up and slice me a thick piece of cake before she could answer. And I do mean thick. Harry Potter volume seven thick. I could have knocked out a burglar with this piece of cake. Once I tasted it, though, it seemed just the right size.
Maureen Johnson
#34. All that winter's day and far into the night the kings twisted and squirmed, but Merlin held them in his iron grasp and would not let go. He became first a rock, and then a mountain in Arthur's defence. Arthur stood equally unmoved. No power on earth could have prevailed against them ...
Stephen R. Lawhead
#35. I think it could have real changing effects on the financial markets of our country, it could cause investors to think more about real rates of return and that in turn could spawn new kinds of products,
Robert Rubin
#36. All these guys picking on smart kids and calling them geeks and dweebs are going to grow up and want to know why they don't do something about the terrible state the world is in. I can tell you why. By the time they grow up, most of the kids who realy could have changed things are wrecked.
Bruce Coville
#37. Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is a rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot.
Fran Lebowitz
#39. I often find things at thrift stores and library sales that I never could have been looking for. In those cases, the research is done after the fact to figure out what, exactly, I've found. It's surprising how much out there still has no online presence.
Michael Dumontier
#40. Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet.
James S.A. Corey
#41. Although I could hear the echo of my footsteps, I could have sworn I was walking a few centimeters above the ground
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#42. My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Margaret Atwood
#43. Cant we own each other?
If brains could have orgasms, I'm pretty sure this is what it would feel like.
Cora Carmack
#44. So many of my rookie mistakes could have been avoided by first-hand exposure to other, more experienced technology entrepreneurs.
Kathryn Minshew
#45. I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.
Oprah Winfrey
#46. Big mama didn't tell her as much as she probably could have, but she was so proud of Chanel and everything that she had accomplished and was accomplishing. Chanel
Nako
#47. The truth will always lead you to a better place and a bigger place. And every single setback, every single one, has led me - not in my time, but in the time that it was meant to happen - to a place that I never in a million years could have imagined that I could go or become.
Suze Orman
#49. Impulsive actions led to trouble, and trouble could have unpleasant consequences.
Stieg Larsson
#50. Salespeople move an economy of a nation. Someone could have invented the most amazing invention that is going to be a revolution for a planet, but that product goes nowhere unless someone sells it to someone else.
Michael Delaware
#51. When we go adventuring with Jesus, He takes us places we never dreamed we could go, gives us ideas we never thought we could have, and gives us friends that last forever.
Mark Batterson
#52. Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite the fact that our world is the poster child for habitability.
Seth Shostak
#53. It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
Ann Patchett
#54. If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is readyto sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. First thought? I'd kissed you without knowing for sure that you were gay and it could have blown up in my face. Then, when it didn't, I thought about kissing you again. After that I just wanted to be the person you could confide in and trust with the all the pain I saw in you.
Jessie G.
#56. Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.
Richard Dawkins
#57. It was difficult to image quite where this gentleman [a statue] could have come from: he was a little too cheerful for a saint in a church and not quite comical enough for a coffee-house sign.
Susanna Clarke
#58. But ... as bad as it was, I learned something about myself. That I could go through something like that and survive. I mean, I know it could have been worse
a lot worse
but for me, it was all I could have handled at the time. And I learned from it.
Nicholas Sparks
#59. If you drive the same car as me, and have been in a fender bender, I'll think, "Boy, that's what my car could look like." Same with clones. If one of my clones got beat up, I'll think, "Boy, that could have been me. Better me squared than me.
Jarod Kintz
#60. If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.
Saul David
#61. The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It's the karma effect, Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon.
Stefania Mattana
#62. Rafa being 6-1 against Roger is not a source of pride for me. I'm happy that Rafa won the tournament, but I would have liked that Federer could have won the Grand Slam, because I think he's a phenomenal player. For me, he is the player I enjoy watching the most.
Toni Nadal
#63. Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.
Rose Macaulay
#64. I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.
Elyn Saks
#65. My aim in writing The Watch That Ends the Night was not to present history. My aim was to present humanity. The people represented in this book lived and breathed and loved. They were as real as you or me. They could have been any one of us.
Allan Wolf
#66. Salman Khan is the best co-star that I could have ever started off with. He's very supportive, very chilled out and very nice to work with, so working with him was a great start to my career.
Sonakshi Sinha
#67. Humans were temporal. They aged and, eventually, died. And while she could have dwelled on her tendency to morbidly fixate on this quality, she chose instead, in that moment, to let it go . . . To let it rise like the sun. A dancing veil of light being lifted off the water.
Marilyn Brant
#68. He was nothing to me and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing him well.
Charles Dickens
#69. God did not become flesh and suffer an ignominious death at our hands so that we could have sprawling church campuses, programs, and budgets.
Michael S. Horton
#70. All these different groups of people that are put right in the path of billions of dollars of American tax payers' money. If I had enough time I could have named all of those people [in the song], too! The song would have been 400 minutes long.
John Fogerty
#71. It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.
Ashwin Sanghi
#72. Vidura could have been Yudhishthira's surrogate father.
Abhijit Basu
#73. I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.
H. Beam Piper
#74. It's illegal, you know," he murmurs. "Stealing."
I clear my throat. "Stealing?"
"My heart. I could have you arrested."
I snort. "For that tiny thing? I'd get a misdemeanor at most.
Eliza Crewe
#75. I could have knocked him out in the 3rd round but I wanted to do it slowly, So he would remember this night for a long time.
Mike Tyson
#76. I wish that they could have more freedoms to be able to come and play. I know that the only way that they can get out is by, you know, defecting to another country or whatever, or getting on a boat.
Rafael Palmeiro
#77. You don't want to wake up and realize you could have been happy, that the risks would have been worth it, but you dwindled away your chances.
Sarah Noffke
#78. Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30
Timothy Snyder
#79. Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.
Nick Joaquin
#80. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid.
Michael Lewis
#81. This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided.
Gary Bettman
#82. I know my little 'dirty drawings' are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if - I would like to say 'when,' but I better say 'if' - our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms.
Tom Of Finland
#83. If I had let myself off the hook in college, I could have enjoyed myself a lot more. Knowing that I can't have those years back, I have learned to get the most out of living in the now.
Chris Pine
#84. What better way to connect with people than by staring and talking straight at them? Don't blink - that's one less connection you could have made.
Ze Frank
#85. Not much could have distracted me from coffee, but hearing Julius Caesar quoted at Spencer's certainly did.
Richelle Mead
#86. Before the whole [music] business was calibrated around the selling of records. I never could have imagined that live performance would become kind of a vortex of the business. It's such a seismic shift really.
Arthur Fogel
#87. And I think, on the other end, there were actors who were not as good as I was, perhaps who could have hung in too, but began to blame everything on race.
James Earl Jones
#88. People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.
Jess Walter
#89. Would you like to know your fatal flaw?' Eddie flushed with annoyance. He could have easily made a list of Hochman's flaws, enough to fill several pages. Still, he was curious. 'Please do tell.' 'You judge what you don't understand.
Alice Hoffman
#90. A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.
Charles Abrams
#91. The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.
Twyla Tharp
#92. It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one might suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people.
Bertrand Russell
#93. Love does not have gender. Love is not exclusive! Our hearts have the capacity to love so many people. The only tragedy is when fear, cultural barriers, ridiculous misunderstandings, or arbitrary numbers prevent us from experiencing the joy we could have.
Nadia Scrieva
#94. It was such a depressing time. I didn't look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way.
Zaha Hadid
#95. Refuse any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture
Luis Bunuel
#96. I thought of Al in his dream, looking nothing like this, more like an elegant bat. Broken? Perhaps, but I had put his butterfly back together with my blood. "I never liked the movie Titanic," I said, and he grunted, his gaze sharpening on me. "They both could have gotten on that damn door.
Kim Harrison
#97. Her gratitude warms my shivering insides. I forget the picture I could have posted and realize that it's a gift. Real life doesn't always need to be posted online. I can remember this moment without a photo.
Janet Gurtler
#98. She would always love Holden. She would always want Holden. But until she could have him, she was going to live the best-possible version of her life, and one day - hopefully one day - they'd find their way back to each other again.
Katy Regnery
#99. I just think people are so used to seeing me on shows like 'Vampire Diaries' and 'Pretty Little Liars,' which are more geared toward teens. But in reality, I could have a 12-year-old kid.
Torrey DeVitto
#100. If I could have three wishes, one would be to take an '88 and shove that barrel up Hitler's ass so that cocksucker can cry like the little god-damned girl he is. And hell, after that, I wouldn't need two more wishes.
George S. Patton
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