
Top 100 What If We Quotes
#1. Smack me if we ever get that awful."
"But I smack you so often," she said, "how will you know that's what I'm smacking you for?"
"We shall work out a smacking code.
Gina Damico
#2. We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.
John Cage
#3. One thing both my parents agree on is this: if people are doing something unfair, it's part of our job to remind them what's fair, even if sometimes it still doesn't turn out the way we want it to.
Kelly Jones
#4. I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up
Lenny Bruce
#5. If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.
Nikola Tesla
#6. We are what God calls us to be. Even if we're not what he's calling us to be, we are. Because he called us.
Tim Hiller
#7. The reason why we are disenchanted with ourselves is because we entertain in the depths of our psyche a kind of vision-an anticipated vision of what we could be if we would be what we might be.
Vilayat Inayat Khan
#8. You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go.
Ralph Steadman
#9. What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.
Nouriel Roubini
#10. 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
#11. It is not enough to celebrate Christmas. We need to be changed and shaped by what we are celebrating. If our spiritual life is no better in spite of all our praying, fasting, and church services, then we have not yet begun to fully respond to the significance of Advent and of the Nativity.
Vassilios Papavassiliou
#12. In this world of endless opportunities our dreams compete. If we wait to start a journey, the destination may not be anymore what we wanted to find.
Gisela Hausmann
#13. If we don't learn from each others experience, we are forced to listen to people who have economic reasons to withhold critical information from us all. The other option is to wait for the government to tell us what their financial supporters want us to know.
Richard Diaz
#14. They just expected it to you know ... Paul, Steve and I could have hired our own publicist, if we wanted to, but I kind of liked the way it was more of a cult thing and those that liked it, liked it, you know what I mean?
Amy Sedaris
#15. I'm just an actor, but if the extra part of it is that I'm helping people or people are being helped by the virtue of what we're doing, then that's just a really nice added extra.
Christopher Meloni
#16. I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.
Douglas Adams
#17. 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
#18. It's interesting how we often can't see the ways in which we are being strong - like, you can't be aware of what you're doing that's tough and brave at the time that you're doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you'd be scared.
Lena Dunham
#19. If we don't see to it that our children turn out better than we did, what will become of the world?
Esther M. Friesner
#20. Consult ... /what reinforcement we may gain from hope,/If not, what resolution from despair.
John Milton
#21. If we don't have that, what do we have to live for? Does it matter if it's a lie if it keeps us alive?
Beth Revis
#22. Thinking about the world writ large, I am more optimistic than not that we will tackle our most pressing challenges, whether poverty or equality for women and girls or climate change; but I also know we'll only tackle them if people are really informed about the challenge and what's proven to work.
Chelsea Clinton
#23. The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#24. We are this world. Its next generation. If you're not trying to save us, then what exactly are you trying to save?
Claudia Gray
#25. What I mean is that you aren't even supposed to know we exist. Therefore, how can you completely understand something if you're not supposed to know it's there?
Christina Daley
#26. To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other possibility.
Fred Alan Wolf
#27. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When
Yuval Noah Harari
#28. I wondered if all creatures were drawn to what was dangerous or if we merely wanted light at any cost and were willing to burn for our desires.
Alice Hoffman
#29. Why should we remain innocent of what lurks in the shadows? How can we live in the world if we don't understand how dark and brutal it can be?
Penny Matthews
#30. If you chase the market, it's not going to come to you. You have to have faith in yourself. I think one of the differences in what I call 'civilians' and 'authors' is that we have an antenna hat buzzing all the time.
David Morrell
#31. The basic policy of the British Government was that since the majority of people in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the United Kingdom, that was that. We asked what would happen if the majority wanted something else, if the majority wanted to see Irish unity.
John Hume
#32. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#33. It's hard to stay on purpose if we don't know what our purpose is.
Sam Horn
#34. Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for. And if we don't get it early enough we panic in case we never shall.
P.D. James
#35. Usually we think a person is obligated to do something that would benefit many people, but what if that "something" is committing murder? Which is more important, doing good - or not doing wrong?
William Irwin
#36. We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings today?
Henry David Thoreau
#37. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.
Kim Young-ha
#38. This is our big chance to see what people think of us. The real us. We have to show em there's nothing to be afraid of. If we don't get over our fears, they never will.
Lisi Harrison
#39. Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm
#40. If God is real, why does he align perfectly with our views? We should expect God to challenge us on what we think is right somewhere
Timothy Keller
#41. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places make of us ...
Robert Macfarlane
#42. There are black men who are madly in love with white women. God bless them, if that's what works for them. I just hope that we can strike a balance that portrays black folks and the black family in a light that's not extreme. Those are the types of characters that I find myself attracted to.
Nia Long
#43. If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
Mark Twain
#44. What exactly did we learn in kindergarten? Nothing we wouldn't have learned if we;d stayed home. Okay, we learned that sometimes, by the time you get to the bathroom, it's too late.
Jessica Zafra
#45. But on the upside, I guess we're getting ready to find out if you really only love me for my jet."
"I might love you for your jet," Gabrielle said, straight-faced.
He smiled a Kat. "What about you?"
"Yeah," Kat said, nodding. "I guess that is the question.
Ally Carter
#46. People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?
Matt Haig
#47. I mean, if everything is already set in stone, why try? I prefer to think that we're choosing in every moment what happens next.
Rainbow Rowell
#48. 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
#49. If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?
Katha Pollitt
#50. If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
Simon Pegg
#51. The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.
Tom Robbins
#52. If we all got what we deserved we'd all be dead. And yet somehow God refrains from smiting us. Whatever you ought to have done then, dying won't undo it now.
Rosamund Hodge
#53. What I wanted to do was see if we couldn't balance the budget.
Wilbur Mills
#54. What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
Charles Frazier
#55. Indeed, the real question is not, "Why greatness?" but "What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?" If you have to ask the question, "Why should we try to make it great? Isn't success enough?" then you're probably engaged in the wrong line of work.
James C. Collins
#56. How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?
Ruth Kluger
#57. If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?
John Lancaster Spalding
#58. If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.
Mick Jagger
#59. We play a tough game. If people want to whinge, they can go to a different sport. It's part of the game, it's what I love about it ... and I'd hate to see it go.
Ben Hannant
#60. If we get it wrong about Jesus, it doesn't matter what else we get right.
Randy Alcorn
#61. Even if neither of us got what we wanted, we found freedom in the third choices.
David Levithan
#62. There is a still small voice telling us what is right, and if we listen to that still small voice we shall grow and increase in strength and power, in testimony and in ability not only to live the gospel but to inspire others to do so.
Heber J. Grant
#63. When it is mid week, pause and ponder! The very single days we disregard are what become the very years we wished to have used effectively and efficiently. If we disregard today, we shall remember our had I know tomorrow. Time changes therefore think of the changing times.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#64. We all have a different image of what old is, and if you were exposed to senior citizens at a young age, as I was, it can color your soul with terror.
Billy Crystal
#65. Maybe if we stopped trying to achieve movie standards of greatness, we'd be happy with what we have.
Amber L. Johnson
#66. We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller
#67. If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism
that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.
Walter Cronkite
#68. The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.
Richard Thaler
#69. The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves.
Daisaku Ikeda
#70. The best fiction is often how we interpret our own lives and what we see as our common due. It is created usually as a means of avoiding reality which, if seriously considered, might negate our ability to strive for what might seem impossible.
Anne Edwards
#71. The Word says that if we have a faith as small as a mustard seed we can move mountains. And yet, we limit what God can accomplish through us when we continuously mull over our fears, feed our hopelessness, and encourage anxiety, which then causes doubt. Doubt hinders God's power.
Cheryl Zelenka
#72. All things are yours and you are Christ's - and Christ is God's. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God - whether we live or die, we are God's possession." What more could anyone ask?
Thomas Merton
#73. If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#74. I always wanted to know what it is right. Maybe we know each other from time immemorial, if you know that in you is the eternal energy of goodness, which is most important for you.
Gregor Golob
#75. In mediumship, we cannot overlook the phenomenon of attunement. We attract Spirits that attune with us and to which we are also attracted. If it is true that each person gives according to what he or she has, then it is unquestionable that each one receives according to what he or she gives.
Andre Luiz
#76. What we need to do, as writers, is find out where our market is and adapt to it. I'm not saying that you follow every trend slavishly, but what you see is that, if there is a sea-change in the way that things are being done, then you account for it.
John Scalzi
#77. We ask actors to come to work ready to open a vein, to be emotionally thin-skinned. If someone screams, 'What about my coffee?' it's not about the coffee; it's because they're working in an emotional state. It ain't easy being an actor.
Don Scardino
#78. We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return.
Brit Bennett
#79. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#80. What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
John Cage
#81. Vorobyaninov, I've got a pressing artistic task for you,' he whispered. 'Go over to the exit from the first-class hallway and stand there. If somebody approaches, start singing, loudly.'
The old man was taken aback. 'But what should I sing?'
'Not "God Save the Tsar," that's for sure!
Ilya Ilf
#82. ..the women's movement never left the father Dick's side....We got a share of genocide profits and we love it...If we're Dick's sister and want what he has gotten, then in the end we support that system that he got it all from.
Mary Barfoot
#83. A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#84. The past is gone, Claire. It's like a sand castle washed away by the waves. We can remember what it looked like, but even if we build it again, it won't be the exactly the same.
Megan Hart
#85. In life, you may face hard times. But in the face of adversity, always seek to remain positive. What we think, will eventually become our life. And if you think positive, you will have a positive life.
Sarah Wilson
#86. But if we are to be told by a foreign Power ... what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.
George Washington
#87. I wonder if gratefulness is the bridge from sorrow to joy, spanning the chasm of our anxious striving. Freed from the burden of unbridled desires, we can enjoy what we have, celebrate what we've attained, and appreciate the familiar. For if we can't be happy now, we'll likely not be happy when.
Philip Gulley
#88. Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?
Olivia Laing
#89. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#90. Then one day in school, I turned round to the others and said, 'Dude, what if we started a band like All Time Low?
5 Seconds Of Summer
#91. We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.
Ethel Barrett
#92. If there was one thing I knew, it was that our demons were what shaped who we were. The things we do, the way we act, are all driven by the things we want locked away forever.
Barbara C. Doyle
#93. Do you always drive this way?" "What way?" "As if we're trying to outrun an earthquake.
J.D. Robb
#94. To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right?
David Eagleman
#95. The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.
C.S. Lewis
#96. If we lose our title of "land of the free," what have we got?
Helen Thomas
#97. Most risks we might not take if we could see what we would have to go through to reach our goal. Yet, we would never not take most risks if we knew the great learning experience and soul enrichment they would bring.
Linda Eyre
#98. But it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
John Steinbeck
#99. Let us take pleasure in what we have received and make no comparison; no man will ever be happy if tortured by the greater happiness of another.
Seneca.
#100. What are you doing here? (Terri)
I'll tell you if you tell me why you're here. (Nathan)
No. Leave. (Terri)
No. You leave. (Nathan)
What are we? Four? (Terri)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
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