First They Quotes

#1. Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first; he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing.

Claes Oldenburg

#2. It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of imagination.

Thornton Wilder

#3. In my view, the greatest threat to America's future isn't hiding in a cave in Pakistan or Afghanistan; it's right here at home. Baby boomers like myself are on course to become the first generation of Americans who leave things in worse shape than they found them.

David Walker

#4. One trait stands out in nearly all meteorites: metal; they've got it. So, the best way to find a meteorite is to hear it first.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#5. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#6. I only worked theater jobs, but they were all really silly when I first graduated. I was a line monitor at 'Spamalot,' which means I got there at 8 A.M. and told people how much the tickets were for standing room. I was an NYU Medical School fake patient, to teach doctors how to talk to patients.

Lauren Worsham

#7. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism
which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.

Hunter S. Thompson

#8. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

Havelock Ellis

#9. I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.

William Monahan

#10. A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

Jim Jarmusch

#11. When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.

Laura Donnelly

#12. I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

William, Saroyan

#13. Nonviolence is a method that transforms, first of all, the individual once you understand it and embrace it. It begins with you and, if you can, about transforming individuals so that they love unconditionally.

Coretta Scott King

#14. If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

Graham Joyce

#15. The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.

Bob Woodward

#16. Since this our first show, I think they'll see us sweat a lot.

Keith Emerson

#17. I work a lot, and it's kind of like, you meet people, and you just click. It's not like I'm looking at something and thinking: 'South Park' - how do I get on that?' I just became friends with those guys first. They're nice guys.

Bill Hader

#18. Love was not in it for me at first. I dated guys because of the way they looked. And then I began to learn that it's what's inside that counts. Love to me now is understanding. It's giving.

Crystal Waters

#19. Producers like to record all the drums first, then they do the bass, then all the guitars, so you're constantly moving from one song to another.

Noel Gallagher

#20. when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal.

Michael Lewis

#21. Korean audiences are amazing. The fans scream so loud, and that really surprises skaters when they first perform in my shows.

Kim Yuna

#22. I've learned several lessons over the years. First, never take yourself too seriously, or work is boring. Next, people make the difference. You can have great technology, but if it's not complemented by great people, it won't go anywhere. Finally, customers buy from people they like.

John W. Thompson

#23. I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate: I'm a woman; I'll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate; I am an immigrant; I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, 'Yes, but are you gay?' and I said, 'Nobody's perfect.'

Mazie Hirono

#24. I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

Michael Chabon

#25. Jesus Christ was the original rock'n'roll star. He gave people reasons to live in the rut they were living in. He was the first man to say, "You don't have to have human sacrifices, 'cause human sacrifices hurt somebody, you know?" Just believe in the spirit that is within you.

Ozzy Osbourne

#26. I think people recognize me if I am going out to dinner or if I am staying in a hotel. They are not quite sure at first because I have grown up a lot.

Emma Bunton

#27. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#28. That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States. NEW

Isabel Wilkerson

#29. When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.

Meg Rosoff

#30. Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.

Joseph Goebbels

#31. Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they'd cancel each other out?

Jodi Picoult

#32. If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.

Ann Patchett

#33. But in any case, I did poorly on the tests and so, in the first three years of school, I had teachers who thought I was stupid and when people think you're stupid, they have low expectations for you.

Robert Sternberg

#34. I mean, you can't have sex until you're married if you're Mormon. The first time I had sex, my parents found out. They were listening in on the phone while I was talking about sex to my girlfriend. They freaked out, man. They both cornered me in my bedroom.

Bert McCracken

#35. I knew those fuckers were smarter than they appeared. Dammit, first they're runners, now they're climbers. They're breaking all the fucking zombie rules! Juan looked personally insulted by this development.

Rhiannon Frater

#36. The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.

W. Edwards Deming

#37. You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.

George MacDonald

#38. Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader.

Maren Elwood

#39. You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.

Peter Drucker

#40. Some of us die long before our last breath. We perish in the fire of love, reduced to ashes in the consuming blaze. No, we do not die when our hearts cease to beat, but when they start beating the first time
for somebody else.

Shakieb Orgunwall

#41. To me, the main weakness of EDA is its failure to enquire why the data were collected in the first place and its consequent tendency to apply ingenious methods largely because they are so attractively ingenious.

Michael Healy

#42. Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do.

Bill Cosby

#43. Let no man grumble when his friends fall off, As they will do like leaves at the first breeze; When your affairs come round, one way or t'other, Go to the coffee house, and take another.

Lord Byron

#44. Everyone has these two visions when they hold their child for the first time. The first is your child as an adult saying "I want to thank the Nobel Committee for this award." The other is "You want fries with that?".

Robin Williams

#45. Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.
Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer's third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.

Seth Godin

#46. If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn't go off.

Michael Scheuer

#47. They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools.

Charlie Munger

#48. The very first concert I ever went to on my own was actually Rory Gallagher. In a one-month period in 1973 or '74, I saw him, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. I wasn't really a big Rory Gallagher fan, but I thought his guitar playing was fabulous. But Thin Lizzy, they were fabulous.

Robert Smith

#49. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

Cyril Connolly

#50. I reflected, not for the first or last time, that when you are reading, others think they can disturb you because you are not doing anything.

James Tipton

#51. He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.

Michel De Montaigne

#52. Fine, you do that, and you tell them that at the very first opportunity, I'm coming down there and killing all of them. Mass murder. And after they're all dead, I'm going to kick the bodies around, dance on top of them, and sing a happy song. No jury will convict me.

Nora Roberts

#53. To really enjoy the better things in life, one must first have experienced the things they are better than.

Oskar Homolka

#54. My role 14 years ago in Richard III - that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it - they have all the fun!

Denzel Washington

#55. My first record wasn't even with the Fugees. I was signed to Big Beat Records, so I was signed back in 1989 to the label that the Knocks are on now. You can always tell which generation had the pulse based on how they see things.

Wyclef Jean

#56. Instruments fascinate me because they're completely awkward. When I picked up a guitar for the first time I was like, "What is this?" because it's so foreign and unknown.

Brie Larson

#57. You make the work for yourself first and the next line is the people you trust, and you know that they're going to tell you what they feel. They let you know if you're dishing bullshit or if it's real.

Robert Longo

#58. Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

Jonathan Haidt

#59. The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

Bob Shacochis

#60. A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place.

Arthur Herman

#61. Earth natives didn't absorb everything from the forms they had chosen over the long years the sun had risen and set over Namid. They were first and always terra indigene. But they learned from the predators they became, and certain traits were passed down to the young of each form. Yes,

Anne Bishop

#62. It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, 'Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after' and the rest of the book was blank.

Simon Travaglia

#63. After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.

Irin Carmon

#64. Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

H.L. Mencken

#65. What are you doing?" she asked, trying to raise herself.
"First, I thought I'd show you what a pity it would be if they cut off my wicked tongue.

Melina Marchetta

#66. It was memorable the first time 'The New Yorker' bought a cartoon from me. I had been sending them batches for years every week, and they didn't respond to them.

Bruce Eric Kaplan

#67. Hey, just be grateful I'm old. When an Arcadian first starts time-walking, we only have about a three percent chance of success. I once ended up on Pluto. (Sebastian) Are you serious? (Channon) They're not kidding about it being the coldest planet. (Sebastian)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#68. Am I the man who killed Deep Purple? I don't think so. I think every band from that era, even if you look at Led Zeppelin, if you look at their first four albums, they're extremely different from one another, and I've never made the same album twice.

Glenn Hughes

#69. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Peter Ellis

#70. I don't need friends. All they do is eat your food, drink your beer, then spew your secrets the first time you do something that displeases them. No offense, but when you have as many enemies as I do, you keep your secrets under lock and key. (Solin)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#71. Little Britain ... ever since it first came on ... I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain.

Paul Feig

#72. We're not going to teach you the easy way to be poly. The tools we recommend will seem hard, because they are - at first.

Anonymous

#73. Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones

Stephen King

#74. Those who begin below, as so many do today, assume that God's love is whispered first in their inner senses, that it is part of their nature, that it is part of creation. And they assume that it becomes real to them when they experience its therapeutic benefits.

David F. Wells

#75. There are tons of great names who have gotten fourth at their first Olympics, and they just kept with it for the next quad. I'm among good company.

Gracie Gold

#76. They say you start weaving clearer, sharper memories after you've been to a place at least twice. Because then the reflection is more of validation. Let the rush come to you and let your senses be flushed the first time. There will be time for reflection after you've had your fill.

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

#77. I figured managing people was obvious - I'd tell someone what they needed to do and they'd do what I wanted. It turns out that's not the case. It was frustrating at first.

Jon Oringer

#78. Many Lexington natives believe they live in a special place, one impossible to leave. I'm not so sure about that - or it's more accurate to say I think a more general truth exists beneath it: the place you first call home stays with you always, whether you remain or go.

Kim Edwards

#79. In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.

Wangari Maathai

#80. It's weird when you hear teachers call each other by their first names. It's like they're friends or something.

Brian Francis

#81. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame

Terry Pratchett

#82. I took an acting class. After the first day, the teacher quit, so they said take another. When I saw 'How to be a Stand-up Comedian,' it resonated. I realized I'd rather make 200 people laugh than make one person cry.

Wendy Liebman

#83. Great companies first build a culture of discipline . . . and create a business model that fits squarely in the intersection of three circles: what they can be best in the world at, a deep understanding of their economic engine, and the core values they hold with deep passion.

Isadore Sharp

#84. It was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first - a relatively painless way to go.

Neal Stephenson

#85. If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing.

Brock Yates

#86. My parents strapped a pair of plastic skis on my boots when I was two years old and sent me down our driveway in Vail. Of course, they were holding on to me the whole time, but that was my first experience 'skiing.'

Mikaela Shiffrin

#87. When they'd first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.

Dennis Lehane

#88. Love; I consider true love happens once in a lifetime. I really don't understand when people love someone and marry someone else. Either they never loved anyone at first place or they befool themselves by saying that we have moved on.

Ritu Chowdhary

#89. Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

Fareed Zakaria

#90. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.

Roger Williams

#91. Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.

Jonathan Galassi

#92. I am a big believer that you have to nourish any relationship. I am still very much a part of my friends' lives and they are very much a part of my life. A First Lady who does not have this source of strength and comfort can lose perspective and become isolated.

Nancy Reagan

#93. Whatever the era ... one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first.

Barbara Bush

#94. The 1930s Hollywood was capable of hurting me so much. The things about Hollywood that could hurt me (when I first came) can't touch me now. I suddenly decided that they shouldn't hurt me - that was all.

Joan Crawford

#95. Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

Thucydides

#96. People love misery, they love to feel sorry for themselves, and they definitely don't want to be enlightened. That's the first thing they tell you at boot camp in the higher worlds.

Frederick Lenz

#97. 'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Sue Monk Kidd

#98. I think that 'Degrassi' really challenged its actors. I was on it for seven years, and it was one of my first jobs. I can't even watch the early episodes - they're so embarrassing! But I really do think I grew as an actor and learned a lot over the seven years.

Stacey Farber

#99. My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation. They weren't married, and I thought that was normal. We called them by their first names.

Rachel Kushner

#100. I think the biggest mistake most people make when they pick their first job is they don't worry enough about whether they'll love the work, and they worry more about whether it's good experience

Steve Ballmer