Marginal Quotes

#1. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

Mark Strand

#2. The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.

Wangari Maathai

#3. To speak as black, female, and commercial lawyer has rendered me simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal.

Patricia J. Williams

#4. It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.

Terry Tempest Williams

#5. Unions are at a disadvantage in a company vote because the employees can see that the greatest advocates of unionization are often the malcontents and marginal workers.

James Cook

#6. The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.

Malcolm Gladwell

#7. Regressives say small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax. Don't believe this, either. Only just over 1 percent of small-business owners earn enough to be taxed at the top rate - and that's just on the portion of their incomes exceeding $379,000. The

Robert B. Reich

#8. The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world.

Luis Gonzalez

#9. Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.

Thomas Hardy

#10. The Senate needs to leave enough money in the proposed budget to not only reduce all marginal rates, but to eliminate the death tax, so that people who build up assets are able to transfer them from one generation to the next, regardless of a person's race.

George W. Bush

#11. The problem is yes, everything works. Doing everything at once makes you marginal at everything ... at best.

Dan John

#12. There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition.

Moby

#13. So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

Hilary Mantel

#14. in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

Joseph A. Tainter

#15. Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts.

Patrick McHenry

#16. I do think there is room at the very top for marginal tax changes.

Richard Hanna

#17. In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

John Ralston Saul

#18. Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

William S. Burroughs

#19. Well, I think the reality is that as you study - when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth. They expanded the economy. They expand tax revenues.

Mike Pence

#20. It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

Kurt Vonnegut

#21. An interactive debugger is an outstanding example of what is not needed - it encourages trial-and-error hacking rather than systematic design, and also hides marginal people barely qualified for precision programming.

Harlan Mills

#22. The big lie out there, the big lie that the Republicans propagate day after day, is that cutting marginal rates for those at the top is going to create jobs. It's simply not true.

Eliot Spitzer

#23. I don't think fairness means that you give equal time to every point of view no matter how marginal. You weigh the sides, you do some truth-testing, you apply judgment to them.

Bill Keller

#24. Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

Michael Eric Dyson

#25. Where life is fully and consciously lived in our own neighborhood, we are cushioned a little from the impact of great far-off events which should be of only marginal concern to us.

Hubert Butler

#26. I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor - that's common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements.

Tim O'Reilly

#27. I go out of my way to stay off commuter planes. I have skipped conferences because I would not fly on marginal airlines (and because of many mishaps, I also avoided flying on ValuJet).

Mary Schiavo

#28. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

David Edelstein

#29. What Governor Romney is proposing is an across-the-board cut in marginal tax rates for households, every household in America by 20 percent. And we'll have to broaden the base to pay for that. Also, a very deep cut in the corporate rate.

Glenn Hubbard

#30. The natural model for music and anything else where the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are close to zero is variable pricing.

Chris Anderson

#31. Indeed, when all parties campaign effectively the overall effect is to push up voting rates, as you see in tight marginal seats or close general elections. That must be good for democracy.

Lucy Powell

#32. If school principals have given up on the important things and are focusing on discipline, they are creating a certain, diluted reality. In an organization that functions properly, discipline should be a marginal issue.

Itay Talgam

#33. I wouldn't be comfortable, but at least I'd have marginal protection against pointy steel objects that went stab in the night.

Lisa Shearin

#34. I'm still a marginal figure living from book to book, but, as long as I'm producing labour as a good Marxist prole, I guess I'm satisfied.

William T. Vollmann

#35. Latin food suffers like Chinese. You can do marginal Chinese and be successful. You can do crappy Mexican and be packed.

Aaron Sanchez

#36. You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.

Atom Egoyan

#37. I don't think there's any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don't like or respect in at least some way or another. We're all marginal laborers - we're practically medical oddities - so I don't see why we can't all be nice to each other.

Chris Ware

#38. The marginal people on the trading desks, there's no skill set. If they don't trade derivatives, I don't know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.

James Chanos

#39. Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.

Simon Hoggart

#40. In politics, the number of women in the cabinet has fallen and, if current poll trends continue and Labour loses a number of marginal seats, the number of female MPs is likely to drop significantly.

Lucy Powell

#41. Music that touches the transcendental aspect of a human being is reserved for a marginal audience

John McLaughlin

#42. My doctor told me I was going to be marginal at this test and he'd given me some hope that maybe I was going to be OK. But when I went in and did it I realized I wasn't going to be able to pass it so I've been working on accepting reality.

Doug MacDonald

#43. Capricornia is one of the most marginal seats in the country. So naturally the electoral battle is fought in the marginal seats.

George Brandis

#44. A forced equalization of wages that disregards the marginal contributions of different workers will deaden incentives and lead to a misallocation of resources and effort.

Raghuram G. Rajan

#45. It's difficult to find a person who can accept the truth consistently and more when it is related to him only and that's what keeps the difference between the real talk and the negative talk very marginal.

Anuj

#46. Tax rates for the wealthy should revert to Clinton-era levels, both because it is necessary for long-term deficit reduction and because fairness dictates it. Moreover, there is no proof that higher marginal rates dissuade investment, all the rhetoric from the Right notwithstanding.

Eliot Spitzer

#47. She tried to wash off the angel dust, with only marginal success. Her skin continued to shine but it wasn't as noticeable. And thankfully, the stuff didn't, in fact, glow in the dark.

Nalini Singh

#48. As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

Pankaj Mishra

#49. There is nothing so marginal as a party that has been in power for 18 years and slides into opposition. You influence nothing.

Sebastian Coe

#50. Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn't.

Matthew Syed

#51. An e-book can be produced and distributed at near zero marginal cost.

Jeremy Rifkin

#52. Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.

Jay Parini

#53. Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.

Richard Lamm

#54. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.

John Maynard Keynes

#55. Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

Joanna Russ

#56. Barack Obama is not Harry Truman, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan to stop World War II. Barack Obama is not John F. Kennedy, who lowered marginal tax rates to get economic growth and job creation. Barack Obama and the far left, they are a completely different ball of wax.

Monica Crowley

#57. In New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.

Vivian Gornick

#58. If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

Ezra Pound

#59. One way ... in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.

Raymond Geuss

#60. If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

Moby

#61. I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes.

David Ogilvy

#62. If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

Martin Jacques

#63. No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.

David Halberstam

#64. When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.

Freeman Dyson

#65. I can't imagine an argument that says that raising marginal tax rates on high income people, many of whom are business owners, is a recipe for economic growth.

Glenn Hubbard

#66. The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.

Richard Koch

#67. I played the mini-tours for a lot of years, and man, you see some weird things out there. There are a lot of desperate people, strange personalities and marginal players, and with that you're going to see some cheating.

Boo Weekley

#68. There is only a "marginal difference" separating those who are truly successful and those who merely do well.Whether you believe you can do something or not, you are right!

Henry Ford

#69. We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.

Richard Lamm

#70. monopsony" rather than monopoly), in which case the owner of capital can impose a rate of return greater than the marginal productivity of his capital.

Thomas Piketty

#71. Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.

William Lane Craig

#72. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Daniel M. Gilbert

#73. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

Mary Ruefle

#74. Gay culture is far from 'marginal,' being rather 'intersectional,' the conduits between unlike beings.

Judy Grahn

#75. I'm not saying that they were Einsteins; they were marginal students. But every ballplayer whoever touched me has moved up his station in life. And the players moved up my station.

Al McGuire

#76. Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.

Raymond Williams

#77. [Society] is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

Meg Jay

#78. Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

Anne Rice

#79. Our current use of time is not rational. There is therefore no point in seeking marginal improvements in how we spend our time. We need to go back to the drawing board and overturn all our assumptions about time.

Richard Koch

#80. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.

Sheridan Hay

#81. Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.

Edward Hirsch

#82. Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.

Sean Wilentz

#83. That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Kurt Vonnegut

#84. The margin is very marginal.

Bobby Robson

#85. The marginal cost of doing something 'just this once' always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher. Yet unconsciously, we will naturally employ the marginal-cost doctrine in our personal lives.

Clayton Christensen

#86. I would not run as a one-issue candidate. Anybody who does that is declaring himself to be marginal.

John Bolton

#87. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.

Clayton M Christensen

#88. I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

Emil Cioran

#89. I think, in effect, in most of the European countries, the total marginal tax rate is over 50 percent; that's to say, add on other taxes like VAT to the income tax.

James Mirrlees

#90. A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses-Hispanically owned or otherwise-pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.

George W. Bush

#91. A Tong can perhaps be defined as a mutual benefit society for people with a common interest which is illegal or dangerously marginal - hence, the necessary secrecy.

Hakim Bey

#92. People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.

Ray Dalio

#93. I really don't know one plane from the other. To me they are just marginal costs with wings.

Alfred Kahn

#94. In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

Noam Chomsky

#95. Play, as a consumers' good, is subject to the law of marginal utility, as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods.

Murray Rothbard

#96. Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.

Neil MacGregor

#97. It [humor] inhabits the marginal.

Penelope Gilliatt

#98. I agree that Scott Lively is marginal, and that is exactly why evangelicals must not let him speak for them. But in Uganda, Scott Lively is allowed to address the parliament for five hours, and his hate-filled message led directly to the anti-homosexuality bill.

Roger Ross Williams

#99. The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

Judith Butler

#100. I myself was nothing more than a collection of marginal selves who sit out their time like unpaid stevedores on an unfinished pier where no boats ever dock.

Andre Aciman