Top 100 Specter Quotes
#1. I knew by experience and by observing many of my friends the baneful, destructive effect which participation in a war has on almost every man.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#2. There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.
Will Durst
#3. Arlen Specter is the man who voted in favor of Bill Clinton during impeachment, voted against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, voted against school choice for the District of Columbia, endorses an absolutist interpretation of abortion rights. He is bright and he is tough and he belongs elsewhere.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#4. Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.
Marya Mannes
#5. I'm attached to my children with whatever flaws they have, and if some glorious angel broke through the living room ceiling and offered to exchange them for other, better children, I'd cling to my kids and pray away this specter.
Andrew Solomon
#6. Across the continent, political divisions are deepening. For all of these reasons, the specter of a euro zone collapse has not been dispatched.
Barry Eichengreen
#7. Stocking up" is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.
Ruth Ozeki
#8. The most terrifying specter that haunts the modern psyche is not death or disease or nuclear annihilation. It is loneliness.
Terryl L. Givens
#9. runaway my phantom bride
and take your bouquet of poisonous flowers
float away specter
and take the rest of my desire
A.P. Sweet
#10. Among all my recollections, among all the numberless sensations of my life, the memory of the lone murder I had committed weighed heaviest on my mind.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#11. Even when you have gone as far as you can, and everything hurts, and you are staring at the specter of self-doubt, you can find a bit more strength deep inside you, if you look closely enough.
Hal Higdon
#12. This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,
the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.
Frances Power Cobbe
#13. After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
Emil M. Cioran
#14. These are challenging times for all Americans. We face the specter of war abroad and a steady stream of bad economic news at home.
Robert Matsui
#15. At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford's constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.
Richard Ben-Veniste
#16. Against the advice of my wife, I endorsed Arlen Specter. I should have listened to my wife.
Rick Santorum
#17. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Camille Paglia
#18. A new generation forgets the specters that may have tormented the old ... And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same specter assailing the same man century after century.
Halldor Laxness
#19. At a career peak, there is certainly the specter of competition from below, but just as importantly, there's the risk that if we aren't on a curve that satisfies us emotionally, we may be the cause of our own undoing.
Whitney Johnson
#20. Senator Arlen Specter hasn't really switched parties; he's simply realized he cannot win the Pennsylvania Republican primary election.
Michael Reagan
#21. Perhaps unrequited love was like a specter in the house, a presence that brushed at the edge of senses, a heat in the dark, a shadow under the sun.
Sherry Thomas
#22. The specter of unrequited love can strike at any time, reducing even the most fearless, independent woman to a weepy wreck
Abby McDonald
#23. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests.
Evan Bayh
#24. Night was swiftly approaching, but darkness would soon be a specter of the past
Luis Gonzalez
#25. The root of all human misfortune and suffering was that red European specter that the lion-headed man with the tobacco pipe had boasted had put down roots in this land, the seed of that red mushroom!
Bandi
#26. No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.
Arthur Schnitzler
#27. Matter of fact, the way we got a path, a great friend, Arlen Specter, I convinced him to switch parties. Not a joke. Not a joke. He was the deciding vote.
Joe Biden
#28. There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.
Karl Marx
#29. It's like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again." I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn't work out, I could always fall back on being black.
Paul Beatty
#30. Arlen Specter left the GOP because it is a lot easier to win in Pennsylvania as a Democrat than as a Republican. It is that simple. For folks on the Right to brush this off as some sort of 'good purge' is extremely naive.
Chuck Todd
#31. The justice of any single commandment cannot be proven logically in an irrefutable manner, and there is no moral law which is binding under all conditions without exception. Ethics, generally, exist only as far as we are willing to accept them.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#32. Fundamentalists tell us to fear the specter of special rights for gay citizens, though of course gay Americans aren't after special rights - merely equal rights. The irony is that special rights actually do exist in this country-for religious groups.
Sean Faircloth
#33. I don't think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized - it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.
Vivienne Westwood
#34. A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
Ruth Ozeki
#35. I myself have never had one, but now I can picture one. I didn't like Wuthering Heights at first, but the minute that specter, Cathy, scrabbled her bony fingers on the window glass - I was grasped by the throat and not let go. With that Emily I could hear Heathcliff's pitiful cries upon the moors.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#36. Women's rights, men's rights-human rights-all are threatened by the everpresent specter of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat.
Rosika Schwimmer
#37. The technique of winning is so shoddy, the terms of winning are so ignoble, the tenure of winning is so brief; and the specter of the has-been-a shameful rather than a pitiable sight today-brings a sudden chill even to our sunlit moments.
Louis Kronenberger
#39. The story goes like this: he falls in love with Specter first, then he falls in love with Jenny Hill. L
Daniel Wallace
#40. Go back to your ghost, I hear Bryn telling me. But she has it wrong. Bryn is the one who's been living with the ghost-the specter of a man who never stopped loving someone else.
Gayle Forman
#41. We remember the specter of sectarian violence
al Qaeda's attacks on mosques and pilgrims, militias that carried out campaigns of intimidation and campaigns of assassination. And in the face of ancient divisions, you stood firm to help those Iraqis who put their faith in the future.
Barack Obama
#42. Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.
Andrew Sullivan
#43. The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.
Glenn Hubbard
#44. Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
Charles Baudelaire
#45. But the Butlerians turn fear into violence and panic into a weapon. By creating imaginary problems and raising the specter of nonexistent enemies, they transform common people into a wild herd that destroys everything they do not understand.
Brian Herbert
#46. Pounce if I'm outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout's runnin' hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil.
Steve Aylett
#47. No new choices are introduced by raising the specter of disaster. These become opportunities for swearing new allegiance to technology. The solution is to discover new technologies that will correct and modify the harm either potentially or already caused by present technologies.
Donald Phillip Verene
#49. I am not haunted by memories of Vietnam. But I must admit I never thought we would again witness in my lifetime the specter of politicians picking targets and ruling out offensive measures in the absurd hope that the enemy would respond to our restraint by yielding to our demands.
John McCain
#50. The U.S. Senate already has one Arlen Specter too many.
Marco Rubio
#51. Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.
Amanda Ripley
#52. My mother, Lillie Specter, was an angel and totally uninterested in politics.
Arlen Specter
#53. An excellent servant is always present, yet rarely seen or heard. Much like a specter who happens to enjoy cleaning." - The Dowager Marchioness of Wallingham to her butler.
Elisa Braden
#54. We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.
Lance Armstrong
#55. A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.
Hollis Frampton
#56. The UNFPA and other population control organizations are loath to report the truth about falling fertility rates worldwide, since they raise funds by frightening people with the specter of overpopulation. They
Gabriele Kuby
#57. To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#58. Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yet made me forever its exile, a specter with a beating heart?
Anne Rice
#59. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
Andrew Solomon
#60. Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.
Studs Terkel
#61. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
David Brainerd
#62. Life, or the specter of life, is constantly challenging us for acts we've never committed. And sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.
Roberto Bolano
#63. Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.
Ben Shapiro
#64. At this time of the rolling year," the specter said, "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?
Charles Dickens
#65. A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. [It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.
James A. Garfield
#67. The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.
A.J.P. Taylor
#68. Admittedly, there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face.
Ronald Reagan
#70. Being a parent is joyful, but it's also haunted by the specter of loss.
Richard Beck
#71. American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.
Erik Larson
#72. I have never earned one penny from any pharmaceutical company. I will never accept one penny from them either. Ever.
Michael Specter
#73. If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.
Arlen Specter
#75. If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
Michael Specter
#76. 'Natural' is a word that has become unmoored by its meanings. If you go into a vitamin shop, things are natural, and people look at that, and they think it's good. It's no different than any other thing you swallow.
Michael Specter
#77. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,
Arlen Specter
#78. My tenure in the Senate was really as an independent and whichever, regardless of party label.
Arlen Specter
#80. There is a major problem with reliance on placebos, like most vitamins and antioxidants. Everyone gets upset about Big Science, Big Pharma, but they love Big Placebo.
Michael Specter
#81. Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children.
Michael Specter
#82. It costs about $27 million to win a seat in the United States Senate, so when you win one, you like to sit down.
Arlen Specter
#83. It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.
Michael Specter
#84. The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
Michael Specter
#85. Many of the most eloquent people I have ever met work in lab coats every day.
Michael Specter
#86. I have not taken a position on that nuclear option. My view is I'm not going to do anything until I come to that bridge. I'm not going to jump off the bridge until I come to it.
Arlen Specter
#87. No senator's vote, except for the declaration of war or the authorization for the use of force, is more important than the confirmation of a nominee for the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment.
Arlen Specter
#88. Separation of power says the judiciary committee is supposed to confirm qualified judges and then what the Supreme Court does, that is their function, not my function.
Arlen Specter
#90. Neither this nation nor this party can afford a candidate so captive to the demands of the intolerant right that we end up re-electing a president of the incompetent left.
Arlen Specter
#91. Some people will deny anything that displeases or scares them: unusual pain in their chests, unwanted lumps beneath their skin, or the fact that humans share ancestry with apes are a few examples. Another is climate change.
Michael Specter
#92. Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.
Michael Specter
#93. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established highly specific criteria for the diagnosis of Lyme disease: an acknowledged tick bite, the appearance of a bull's-eye rash, and, for those who don't live in a region where Lyme is common, laboratory evidence of infection.
Michael Specter
#94. All the food we eat, whether Brussels sprouts or pork bellies, has been modified by mankind. Genetic engineering is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.
Michael Specter
#95. It's inspirational to see someone who is dying smile.
Arlen Specter
#96. I'm battling cancer. It's another battle I intend to win.
Arlen Specter
#97. The best way to deal with climate change has been obvious for years: cut greenhouse-gas emissions severely. We haven't done that. In 2010, for example, carbon emissions rose by six per cent - the largest such increase on record.
Michael Specter
#98. The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
Michael Specter
#100. I don't expect people to agree with all my votes.
Arlen Specter
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