Top 100 The Prize Quotes
#1. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
#2. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
Jaclyn Moriarty
#3. The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
Richard Dawkins
#4. Thomas loved me. He needed me. Maybe I wasn't the first woman he'd loved, and maybe the kind of love a Maddox man felt lasted forever, but I needed him, too. I wasn't the first, but I would be the last. That didn't make me the second prize. It made me his forever.
Jamie McGuire
#5. There is no 'master plan' on the road to the Nobel Prize. It represents a lot of hard work, a passion for that work and ... being in the right place at the right time. For me, that place was Caltech.
Ahmed Zewail
#6. [On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn't read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize.
Bernice Rubens
#7. I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#8. One of the things I prize most about being a writer is its license - you could even say injunction - to be curious, to follow anything anywhere and see where it might take you, how it can transform you, whether in content or form.
Gregory Allen Howard
#9. Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing:
That she beloved knows naught, that knows not this
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
William Shakespeare
#10. You ever see 'The Dating Game'? That's a weird game show. The prize on that show: another contestant. Talk about cheap.
Norm MacDonald
#11. I am so sorry for you, Leslie.' She said it like she really meant it. But not like she was completely surprised. 'And for him. Because he's lost you now.' This last part undid me. Despite her cruel criticism of me over the years, from where she sat, I was anyone and everyone's prize.
Leslie Morgan Steiner
#12. Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.
John Lahr
#13. I remember you organized the big laundry party and all of our friends took their dirty clothes to the laundromat and drank wine out of a wineskin until the manager threw us out because you kept yelling that there ought to be a prize given to the owner of the biggest pair of boxer shorts.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#14. I think the gay community should get smart and drop the word 'marriage.' Do you really need to change every right-wing Christian to make sure you get your equal rights? Eyes on the prize, we should be sticking to getting equal rights.
Ani DiFranco
#15. At the end of their grim race, death might be the only prize.
Lloyd Alexander
#16. American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.
Thomas Friedman
#17. I've truly been blessed. I've taken my time, kept my eye on the prize and done what I've had to do. So I'm able to make a choice when to retire. Most fighters really couldn't.
Floyd Mayweather Jr.
#18. Whatever measure of influence I had as a result of the importance which the world attaches to the Nobel Peace Prize would have to be used to bring the philosophy of nonviolence to all the world's people who grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#19. In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.
Marie Curie
#20. Even when I took first prize, topped the class, won the race, I never really won anything. I was merely avoiding the embarrassment of losing.
Portia De Rossi
#21. He was bursting with enthusiasms. He probably loved many things: the hawk in flight, the god-damned ocean, full moon, Balzac, bridges, stage plays, the Pulitzer Prize, the piano, the god-damned Bible.
Charles Bukowski
#22. Peace is the music of every soul. Our glory lies in understanding, listening and honoring that music
Amit Ray
#23. A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.
Joshua Lederberg
#24. I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.
Gerald Early
#27. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#28. In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.
Elizabeth Blackburn
#29. Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one - Marie, the famous Madame Curie - and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.
Isaac Asimov
#30. I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Zack Snyder
#31. I started in the P.A. world and craft service and storyboard artist, with the eye on the prize of directing. When I was directing second unit on Babel, I ended up casting most of the unknown parts. In these weird circles, I was this guy who found these kids on the streets.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
#32. The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.
Maria Montessori
#33. I prize the soul that slumbers in a quiet eye.
Eliza Cook
#34. I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.
Vijay Seshadri
#35. I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.
Evan Hunter
#36. To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life.
Cecil Rhodes
#37. Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.
Paul Muldoon
#39. Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.
Victor Hugo
#40. I am honoured to join education innovators like Ms. Vicky Colbert, Dr. Madhav Chavan, and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as the fourth WISE Prize for Education Laureate. I accept this prize on behalf of the million girls Camfed is committed to supporting through secondary education.
Ann Cotton
#42. Atheism or similar charges was not unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles.
Benjamin Jowett
#43. When to the Permanent is sacrificed the Mutable, the prize is thine: the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the changeless change - Non-Being, the glorious state of Absoluteness, the Bliss past human thought.
Alexander Pope
#44. I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
Seamus Heaney
#45. Doctor, my eyes cannot see the sky. Is this the prize for having learned how not to cry?
Jackson Browne
#46. The Macedonian Endeavour Channel was screening live coverage of the world series of the Who's Got the Stupidest Name (WGSN) competition. First prize had already gone to Brian Burdock, a French Algerian with a penchant for Longchamp.
St John Morris
#47. One of my books, 'Rain Falling on My Face,' earned me the 39th Edogawa Ranpo prize. It's a very prestigious literary prize in Japan, mostly for mysteries and thrillers.
Natsuo Kirino
#48. Let many things unfold before their eyes, Let the crowd stare and be amazed, for then You'll win their hearts, and that's to win the prize;
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#49. Still I rise Still I fight Still I might crack a smile Keep my eyes on the prize See my haters tell em hi
Nicki Minaj
#50. No prize , however great can justify an ounce of self deception or a small departure of the ugly facts. ( Notes from Underground)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#51. The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
Norman Mailer
#52. The Nobel Peace Prize has become hopelessly politicized. I think it cheapens the prize itself.
John Bolton
#53. One day I gave Clifford a bath. And I combed his hair and took hom to the dog show. I'd like to say Clifford won first prize ... but he didn't. I don't care. You can keep all your small dogs. You can keep all your black, white, brown, and spotted dogs. I'll keep Clifford ... Wouldn't you?
Norman Bridwell
#54. The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity ...
Marianne Williamson
#55. The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Robert Henri
#57. The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
#58. When if or chance or hunger's powerful sway Directs the roving trout this fatal way, He greedily sucks in the twining bait, And tugs and nibbles the fallacious meat. Now, happy fisherman; now twitch the line! How thy rod bends! behold, the prize is thine!
John Gay
#59. If the double helix was so important, how come you didn't work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.
Ava Helen Pauling
#60. Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.
Richard Yates
#61. I have tried hard to be a good person and to leave the world a better place. To feel that I have in any small way succeeded is to me a prize beyond measure, the most wonderful wealth that I could ask for, a form of prosperity that I would wish for the whole world to experience and enjoy.
Roz Savage
#62. I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger advances, more prizes. It's a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt.
Pankaj Mishra
#65. My research, even before 1972, moved in directions beyond those cited for the Nobel Memorial Prize. Most of it, in one way or another, deals with information as an economic variable, both as to its production and as to its use.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow
#66. There is a responsibility that goes with winning the Nobel Prize, and the responsibility is that if you have a forum, you should use it wisely.
James Heckman
#67. The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.
Nathan Myhrvold
#68. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. My vagina claps her pretty lips, and my magic marble lights up like we've won the million-dollar prize.
Helena Hunting
#70. In 1982 when I showed up, the average age of the drivers in the series was something like 40, 41. The crowds were small. There was not much prize money. The competition wasn't very tight.
Bobby Rahal
#71. I think it is true to say that I am not the first Nobel Prize winner in economics to have little formal training in economics.
Clive Granger
#72. In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
Donald Hall
#73. I think it's fair to say that the Nobel Prize is the highest honor any scientist or artist can achieve.
John O'Keefe
#74. She settled back in the chair and draped one leg casually over the other, her hands coming to rest together on her knee.
"Arrest me. Torture me. Parade me about in the public square. You will have your prize catch. And you will lose everything.
G.S. Jennsen
#75. I am really honoured, but if the prize had gone to Mahatma Gandhi before me, I would have been more honoured.
Kailash Satyarthi
#76. There is no other prize in any country that carries the prestige that a Nobel bestows.
Barry Marshall
#77. For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
Junot Diaz
#78. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
[Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]
John Steinbeck
#79. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold or all the riches that the East doth hold.
Anne Bradstreet
#80. Now the greatest external good we should assume to be the thing which we offer as a tribute to the gods, and which is most coveted by men of high station, and is the prize awarded for the noblest deeds; and such a thing is honor, for honor is clearly the greatest of external goods.
Aristotle.
#81. I wasn't athletic as a kid, and I was self-conscious about my body, but then in eighth grade I won a school contest, and the prize was a bunch of personal training sessions.
Matt McGorry
#82. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.
Shelby Foote
#83. One indicator of Ernest Lawrence's influence is the fact that I am the eighth member of his laboratory staff to receive the highest award that can come to a scientist - the Nobel Prize.
Luis Walter Alvarez
#84. A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought.
Stephen Hawking
#85. To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
Randy Sandke
#86. Anyone can win the Nobel Prize if the scientist works hard on his research subject.
Tim Hunt
#87. Because not wanting the prize the gods have arranged for you - that just might offend the hell right out of them.
Megan Whalen Turner
#88. Spiritual giants are only willing, available and thirsty spiritual babies who paid the price for the prize, who waged a war for the victims to become victors, just like the courageous Davids that kill the big Goliaths.
Ikechukwu Joseph
#89. Cheesecake. Are you shitting me? Who invented that? Probably Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe Louis Pasteur. It makes me physically sick to think that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet the name of the inventor of cheesecake isn't tattooed on Dick Cheney's face.
Rob Delaney
#90. Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
#91. Through life's journey, may your feet rest on solid ground, your hands touch the prize of life, and your heart find contentment.
Lorna Jackie Wilson
#92. Competition exists to choose who gets the prize when the prize can't be shared.
Andrew Harvey
#93. The fantasy of the wedding day is that it represents undeniable public and private truth that you have been chosen. For that one day, you are the most valuable creature in the world - a treasure, a princess, a prize.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#94. I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
Saul Alinsky
#95. to earn the prize of being taken seriously among Nigerians in America, among Africans in America, indeed among immigrants in America, she needed more years.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#96. Make-up artists should hereby get the Nobel prize for adding to human happiness. And so should hairdressers. And so should Luke.
Sophie Kinsella
#97. If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - which I think it's fairly safe to say is not going to happen - I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: 'Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.'
Christopher Buckley
#98. It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
William, Saroyan
#99. Putting prize-fighting altogether aside as one of the unavoidable evils attending on this manly exercise, the inestimable value of boxing as a training, discipline, and development of boys and young men remains.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#100. "Keep your eyes on the prize," although I think he should have also said "Go after the prize," too; and maybe that's why prizes ever came his way, because all he ever did was look at them.
Neal Shusterman
