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Some one has said that we are moving so fast that when plans are being made to perform some great feat, these plans are broken into by a youth who enters and says, "I have done it."
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Heart-to-Heart Talks with Philistines by the Pastor of His Flock, The Philistine magazine, May 1913
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Variant: The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
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As quoted in The Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951) by Evan Esar, p. 103

 

Elbert Hubbard

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We can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us at a great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room. We are not the objects of either of these plans. These plans don’t know we’re here. I’m sorry to say, wouldn’t know or care if we stopped being here. We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we’ve been given, or that we've acquired, or that is innate to us.

 

Christopher Hitchens

 

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

 

Edmund Burke

 

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"

 

Thomas Hardy

 

But the mass of the old electors did not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their "betters" to represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a lord, they liked him the better. The issue put before these electors was, which of two rich people will you choose? And each of those rich people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions of the rich — whose plans were their plans. The electors only selected one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy associations.

 

Walter Bagehot

 

One of my chief "crimes" then, was to have wanted Iran to move from the oil age into the atomic age before it was too late. Must I blush for that? The peaceful use of nuclear energy did not create problems for radiation and contamination for us since we have vast stretches of desert...
I was accused of having adopted the plans for nuclear power stations among others for reasons of "personal ambition". Was it not obvious that I would be dead before most of these plans had been carried out? Why speak of personal ambition then? It was rather a question of forseeing Iran's needs. My "personal" ambitions are known to all men of good faith - to preserve national unity, to make the Iranian people as happy as possible and to prepare a more peaceful future.

 

Muhammad Reza Pahlavi