The General Quotes

#1. The problem is a lot of people don't think. The general bloke just goes through life, gets a job, gets married and all that, and that's it.

Paul Simonon

#2. There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Alain Badiou

#3. There is a general kind of praying which fails for lack of precision. It is as if a regiment of soldiers should all fire off their guns anywhere. Possibly somebody would be killed, but the majority of the enemy would be missed.

Charles Spurgeon

#4. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"

Peter Drucker

#5. Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.

Sun Tzu

#6. I preach on specific sins because people are not convicted by sermons on sin in general. It was when our Lord said to the Samaritan woman, 'Go call thy husband ... ' (John 4:16), that she really faced up to her sinfulness.

Vance Havner

#7. The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

Francis Bacon

#8. In general, I feel so much of pop culture is set in the generic big city, particularly comics. I feel like there are so many other stories to tell.

Jeff Lemire

#9. Ear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget

Edgar Allan Poe

#10. Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison.

Hank Azaria

#11. It is possible to state as a general principle that the mesodermic phagocytes, which originally (as in the sponges of our days) acted as digestive cells, retained their role to absorb the dead or weakened parts of the organism as much as different foreign intruders.

Elie Metchnikoff

#12. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#13. You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background

George F. Kennan

#14. [H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

Glenn Greenwald

#15. In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.

B. Carroll Reece

#16. I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

Stephen Jay Gould

#17. It is often written that, during his presidency, the General was not a politician. Of course, he was a great politician in large part because he was not perceived as a politician. It

John Ripin Miller

#18. Assessment coordinators need to be knowledgeable about general higher education topics (e.g., student persistence, the cost of higher education, diversity, and student learning); they must also know how those play out at specific institutions.

Kimberly Yousey-Elsener

#19. When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

Herbert Hoover

#20. You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

Peter Thiel

#21. If you love her, set her free. If she comes back, she's yours. If she doesn't ... Christ! Stubborn woman! Hunt her down, and bring her the hell back; she's still yours according to vampire law.
- Niccolo DiConti, General of the Vampire Queen's Army.

Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

#22. Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places.

John Searle

#23. The idea of having no responsibilities except general edification seems like such a luxury now. When I had it, all I wanted to do was hack around on the Web. Now the vast majority of my hours are hacking around on the Web.

Matt Mullenweg

#24. It is impossible, in my mind, to distinguish between the refusal to receive a petition, or its summary rejection by some general order, and the denial of the right of petition.

Caleb Cushing

#25. The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?),

Steven Pinker

#26. The foundation is an instrument forged by citizens who transfer profit from the commercial sector and put it directly to work as risk capital for the general betterment of the society.

Richard Cornuelle

#27. Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.

Louis MacNeice

#28. 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

#29. With all the defects in our Constitution, whether general or particular, the comparison of our government with those of Europe, is like a comparison of Heaven with Hell. England, like the earth, may be allowed to take the intermediate station.

Thomas Jefferson

#30. Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil's Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.

Stephen Clarke

#31. There is no question that I would be the better president. But as for the campaign, are Americans ready for a general election in which both major party candidates are ADD? Quite frankly, it could provide an opening for a third party candidate, maybe someone backed by the evil Koch brothers.

Joe Biden

#32. Any one detail, followed through to its source, will usually reveal the general state of readiness of the whole organization.

Hyman Rickover

#33. I feel like I have a very unique perspective especially for someone in the hip-hop genre. I'm not afraid to explore it, and how my upbringing then shapes my music and being a New York kid and all of that stuff ... that's really the most unique thing I can offer to the music in general.

Hoodie Allen

#34. The first task is to get to know the players really well-watching them as individuals in training and in match play-to see what is good in their natural game. Then, and only then, can we begin to outline the general tactics.

Helenio Herrera

#35. I don't necessarily find superheroes in general, for me, that appealing. I'd much prefer to play, if I was to be cast in a superhero film, I'd prefer to play the villain because there's a reason, there's a motive behind their madness.

Ryan Kwanten

#36. A particular disappointment is seldom more than an excrescence upon the trunk of a general good
a shower that spoils the pleasure party, but refreshes and enriches the earth.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#37. There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#38. The ground must be a general's best friend, or it becomes his worst enemy.

Joe Abercrombie

#39. In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#40. The majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.

Desiderius Erasmus

#41. Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.

Trevanian

#42. I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

James Heckman

#43. It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.

Henri Poincare

#44. The government is somewhat inept, but the private sector is inept in general. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them. However, every once in a while a Google or a Microsoft comes out, so people keep giving them money.

Bill Gates

#45. In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.

Yukio Mishima

#46. The general rule is that there is profit in confusion; the more confusion, the more profit. Therefore, the best approach is to create problems and then offer the solutions.

Milton William Cooper

#47. A judge's duty is to grant justice, but his practice is to delay it: even those judges who know their duty adhere to the general practice.

Jean De La Bruyere

#48. How many of these rescue missions have you conducted anyway?" "More than I can count," sniffed the general. "I see," said Rex. "How many fingers am I holding up?

Robert Kroese

#49. A lot of the general population are wrong.

J.D. Robb

#50. So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

Roger Penrose

#51. We are the ring of steel around Lord Rahl himself... Two thousand strong. We fall to a man before harm gets a glance at Lord Rahl.
-Commander General Trimack

Terry Goodkind

#52. You listen to any monologue on late-night TV or just in general, to people talking, and there's always a joke at someone's expense. It's sarcasm; it's nasty. Kids grow up hearing that, and they think that's what humor is, and they think it's OK. But that negativity permeates the entire planet.

Ellen DeGeneres

#53. Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop.

Mos Def

#54. It would be far to general a statement to try and describe the daily life of an actor in Hollywood, but I am quite certain that cappucinos have something to do with it.

Corin Nemec

#55. A peculiarity of the higher arithmetic is the great difficulty which has often been experienced in proving simple general theorems which had been suggested quite naturally by numerical evidence.

Harold Davenport

#56. But in Afghanistan, the general rule was that since you were fighting the Taliban, which was not a lawful government force, the Geneva Conventions did not apply. And that led to a lot of excesses in Afghanistan, excesses like Abu Ghraib that were already well-publicized.

Yaroslav Trofimov

#57. Moreover, if we could show, on general logical grounds, that the scientific quest is likely to succeed, one could not understand why anything like success has been so rare in the long history of human endeavours to know more about our world.

Karl R. Popper

#58. Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

Denis Leary

#59. I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

Thomas Jefferson

#60. We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our general headquarters are in Moscow.

Klement Gottwald

#61. If there are further steps to European integration, the people should have their say at a general election or in a referendum.

Tony Blair

#62. At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat mentality.

Damien Chazelle

#63. The actions of the police division today will be to assist the church for the funeral. We anticipate that a fairly large crowd will be outside the church and the general area, ... We're trying to approach everything with common sense.

Thomas Streicher

#64. I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us, and yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects.

Emma Lazarus

#65. I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#66. There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

Linus Pauling

#67. The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You'd think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.

Hanna Rosin

#68. The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.

William Styron

#69. Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.

Sun Tzu

#70. By definition, the person who learns enough to become the nominee is almost certainly the best person for the general election.

Newt Gingrich

#71. [this element], the seat of the appetites and of desire in general, does in a sense participate in principle, as being amenable and obedient to it

Aristotle.

#72. If the primary ends up being a hard hitting, bloody battle, well so be it. Let's get ready for the general election

Steve Lonegan

#73. In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.

Joel Salatin

#74. The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being.

Ashley Montagu

#75. Well, it's a problem in general with the American military. If you are the biggest and the strongest military power in the world, you have this natural reluctance to learn the quirky ways of the natives in faraway lands.

Yaroslav Trofimov

#76. Domestic violence and violence against women in general seems to be a big problem everywhere in the world. It seems to me this problem comes from stress, pent up anger, frustration, and all kinds of negativity within human beings.

David Lynch

#77. When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.

Walter E. Williams

#78. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

Neil Sheehan

#79. The world is like a mirror; if you smile at it, it smiles at you. I love to smile, and so in general, I definitely receive smiles in return.

Peace Pilgrim

#80. The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress. General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit.

Bernard Lown

#81. We have so many rich people in Switzerland. They should take more responsibility for the general public. There is almost no tradition of philanthropy here anymore, unlike in the U.S.

Hansjorg Wyss

#82. Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.

Wilhelm Wundt

#83. The one thing in me more powerful than a general misanthropy is an inescapable compassion for individuals.

Jasper Sole

#84. I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

Ralph Nader

#85. I received orders from Congress to proceed to Charleston in South Carolina, for the purpose of Co'operating with General Lincoln in the defense of that Capitol.

Abraham Whipple

#86. In general, the only way to overcome failure is to not let it destroy you. It's that old saying, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." You just have to keep going.

Christopher Gorham

#87. 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

#88. I think the problem with polemics is that it's general and it's lazy. When you say, "This is bad," that's a general thing. We're more interested in asking the question.

Tony Goldwyn

#89. As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn't get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it - because if it doesn't do the job well, they won't pay for it.

Clayton M Christensen

#90. Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

Asa Gray

#91. In general, there are patients with insomnia who - many patients with insomnia will actually over report the lack of sleep that they are getting.

Shelby Harris

#92. When we are young the noise of general conversation seems much the most fun. When we grow up we discover the possibilities of the tete-a-tete. In maturity the monologue habit sets is. But now at last there is the chance to investigate the rich depth of the silence when the monologue is suspended.

Nanamoli Thera

#93. The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use."
~Louis D. Brandeis

Louis D. Brandeis

#94. But as far as trusting the general run of men, there was no need, since she had no intention of ever expecting anything from one of them again.

Larry McMurtry

#95. My wife, aside from being amazing in general, was really the catalyst in this, and I really owe a lot of the move to New York to her. She reminded me I've always wanted to do move to New York for theater and said, 'Let's stop talking about it and do it.'

Josh Cooke

#96. Disarmament should be conducive to the enhancement of every country's general security instead of becoming the instrument and means for a few countries to strengthen their military superiority by weakening or restricting other countries.

Sha Zukang

#97. The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.

Elihu Root

#98. As a general rule, US-based multinationals should not be trusted until they prove otherwise. This is sad, because they have the capability to provide the best and most trusted services in the world if they actually desire to do so.

Edward Snowden

#99. In general people put too much faith in the rich, the famous, the politicians, and not enough faith in themselves.

Bono

#100. I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

George C. Williams