Top 393 Former Quotes

I’m comfortably asocial – a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.

I have always had great respect for former president Mandela. The personal sacrifices he made in order to achieve what was right for the people of South Africa is something I carry with me every day.

As a former member of the IRA, I accept all the responsibilities that are due to me. But in terms of the individual circumstances, I don’t comment on that.

I don’t recognize my former self. Like I’m on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

Well, I’m a former FBI agent.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I’ve recently been asking him for classical music.

Don Siegelman should be a star in the Democratic Party. Instead, he’s a former elected official sentenced to prison by a right-wing judge in Alabama.

My mother was a – she worked at a halfway house. And one of the former inmates slid me a mix-tape full of different hip-hop songs. And so that was my first kind of experience with rap music.

In New York, the former lack of real competition allowed taxis to extract excessive charges, regardless of the poor service.

At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I’m picking the former, although I would not mind both.

The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas undertaken by the command of his present majesty, has been the advancement of science and the increase of knowledge.

When former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari passed the torch to Zedillo, he knew that economic difficulty lay ahead but believed that the Yale-trained economist’s impeccable technical credentials would be enough to maintain Mexico’s stability.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Under the guidance of the former President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, I have been doing this green initiative. My aim is to plant 1 crore sapling in Tamil Nadu.

I’ve always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former partners no longer speak to each other; only straights could be so cruel and inhuman as to reject totally the person with whom they’ve shared their life for 20 or 30 years.

I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.

Part of being a former abortion clinic worker is learning how to deal with your past sin.

I used to live in Chris Rock’s former apartment. I’ve got some junk mail for him if he wants it.

People say that wrestling is not ballet. But as a former ballerina, I’d like to see some of these men put on a pair of tights and go do what a dancer does. Because it’s a lot! It’s definitely difficult.

The testimony of former abortion workers can help persuade lawmakers to create fair laws that protect women from dirty abortion facilities.

Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former.

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a ‘Dear Murph’ letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan’s father in a film.

At 24 I was a wannabe. I was not a ‘former TV presenter’ as everybody says – I was a young girl living on a wish, appearing on the roulette channel at 1 am and selling cordless kettles on Channel 953.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.

Well, actually, I had been working as a consultant to former companies of Enron, or predecessor companies of Enron and, so, I joined in 1990 to really start our wholesale merchant business.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.

There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

When the Securities & Exchange Commission settled securities-fraud charges against Richard Harriton, former chairman of the clearing subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co., there were smiles all around. The SEC was happy. Harriton was happy. Bear Stearns was happy.

The difference between a gas and a liquid is that in the former, the atoms and molecules move to and fro in an independent existence, whereas in the latter, they are always in touch with one another, though they are changing partners continually.

When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, ‘It’s yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.’

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Those who do not think religious organizations should have an opinion on climate change misunderstand the former and the moral dimension of the latter.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a great leader, possesses the highest possible character, and also happens to be a Browns fan.

The SAS Reserve tends to be made up of former paratroopers and commandos who still want a challenge, but it is open to civilians.

I wanted to win the gold medal and then go home and further my education in college. I had no intentions whatsoever to become a professional fighter because I had heard horror stories about former boxers who made money but, in the end, ended up with nothing. I didn’t want to be one of those guys.

The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy’s heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug.

(On seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.

My mum was born in the former Czechoslovakia, and even though my grandparents weren’t wealthy, they were aristocrats in their time.

Most cocktails containing liquor are made today with gin and ingenuity. In brief, take an ample supply of the former and use your imagination. For the benefit of a minority, it is courteous to serve chilled fruit juice in addition to cocktails made with liquor.

Kochi, formerly called Cochin, is a former European settlement with a large Christian population and a seafaring heritage. It is a town of enormous charm that reminds some visitors of the Caribbean more than India.

As a former music magazine editor, I still pine for the days when I used to know about all the best jams and new bands.

Taxpayers should not be on the hook for subsidizing former presidents’ lives to the tune of millions of dollars.

No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution – and himself – so it’s unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.

There are angels that receive more interiorly the Divine that goes forth from the Lord, and others that receive it less interiorly; the former are called celestial angels, and the latter spiritual angels.

As a rule, I am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I don’t think readers care. I also feel that it just about guarantees that somebody else will be writing a book on the same subject, but being a former journalist, I’m always interested in, like, why write about something today? Why do it now?

As a former recipient of these services I can honestly say that the overwhelming majority of TANF recipients are hard-working Americans who are down on their luck, and just want an opportunity to better their lives and those of their family through work and access to education.