Home > Topic > the first things
1 " The blessing has been so significatn that we have continued our satiric tact [sic] with an additional objective in mind -- keeping the suits and haircuts away. Whenever a promising movement of the Holy Spirit begins nowadays, one of the first things that happens is that the agents, businessmen, and other assorted handlers move in so that they might straighten out certain unmarketable " blemishes" in order to take the show on the road. And when a promising ministry hits the big time, the unfortunate people in it are made twice as much sons of hell as their promoters. It is therefore our resolve to stay as unmarketable as we can. If we ever get invited to the Great Black Tie Banquet of Evangelicalism, we want everyone there to be braced for the moment when we, on a prearranged signal, throw our dinner rolls at Pat Robertson "
2 " That's one of the first things that comes out of young people's mouths when they're in love. FOREVER. And that's cool, it's all good-until you get old enough to realize what forever is. "
― Ice-T , Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood
3 " Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count. "
― John Lydon , Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored
4 " One of the first things we learn from our teachers is discernment: the ability to tell truth from fiction, to know when we have lost our center and how to find it again. Discernment is also one of the last things we learn, when we feel our paths diverge and we must separate from our mentors in order to stay true to ourselves. "
5 " It was no accident that one of the first things God asked of Adam was for him to name the animals he saw around him. Why do you suppose God asked man to do that? Because once you have a name, you have the beginning of understanding, and once you have understanding, you lose fear. God didn’t want man to be fearful. He wanted man to be brave. "
― John Kramer , Blythe
6 " One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don't say as what you do say. "
― Fredrik Backman , Beartown (Beartown, #1)
7 " The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost. "
― George Santayana , The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
8 " Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there. "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Deadeye Dick
9 " ...[O]ne of the first things a Magnolia League debutante learns: Keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself. "
10 " One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I've lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don't speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: 'You don't think I speak English?' This can be the case if you're Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such an scenario to Indians, they couldn't relate — to them, choosing the wrong language wasn't embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said. "
― Michael Erard , Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
11 " As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill. "
― Thomas Sowell , The Quest for Cosmic Justice
12 " The word genius was whispered into my ear the first things I ever Heard while I was still mewling in my crib, laughs Orson (Welles), so it never occured to me that I wasn't until middle age "
13 " To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives. "
― J.D. Vance , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
14 " One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company). "
― V.S. Ramachandran , The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
15 " I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did. "
16 " Funding for sports (and the arts) are often the first things facing the chop in difficult times. "
17 " To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence. "
18 " Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment. "
19 " In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed. "
20 " When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. "
― P.J. O'Rourke
