Top 393 Former Quotes

Once Joe Paterno learned that his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was showering with a young boy in the Penn State football locker room, he had two choices: think of the child as his own and call police. Or not. He chose the latter.
Christine Pelosi
Former president Wulff said Islam belongs to Germany. That is true. I also hold this opinion.
Angela Merkel
It’s a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire… only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
Hanya Yanagihara
The Negro was a political football between his former slave master and Northern political adventurers. The economic basis of this contest was the power to tax, to float bonds, to award franchise: in short, to gain control over the financial resources of the newly organized States.
A. Philip Randolph
I was a fan of Henk Groot, former striker of Ajax, who scored many goals with his head. I thought, ‘I can do that also,’ but I couldn’t.
Louis van Gaal
As a former Apollo astronaut, I think it’s safe to say that SpaceX and the other commercial developers embody the 21st century version of the Apollo frontier spirit.
Rusty Schweickart
What's more important to 'SNL': comedy or buzz? To the

What’s more important to ‘SNL’: comedy or buzz? To the writers, players and guest hosts, it’s probably the former; to Lorne Michaels and the suits at NBC, it’s ultimately probably the latter.
Rachel Sklar
I always marked up a piece of paper before taking a job, looking at the pluses and minuses. If the latter outnumbered the former, I would pass.
Dennis Washington
Many appreciate in my former work just what I did not want to express, but which was produced by an incapacity to express what I wanted to express – dynamic movement in equilibrium. But a continuous struggle for this statement brought me nearer. This is what I am attempting in ‘Victory Boogie Woogie.’
Piet Mondrian
When no other schools in the Southeastern Conference or the former Southwestern Conference would award them athletic scholarships, African Americans had been recruited by and playing for Texas Western since the 1950s.
Solomon Ortiz
We have shown, given these last three years, that we were succeeding in fighting terrorists. While during the first 30 years of the former governments they didn’t.
Alberto Fujimori
Part of me believes that Beyonce and Jay-Z were naive when they chose to celebrate their five-year wedding anniversary in Cuba. However, as the daughter of a former political prisoner in Cuba, I would argue that they should have known better than to travel to the island and support its repressive regime.
Mercedes Schlapp
Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
Martin Cruz Smith
The danger in our system is that the general government, which represents the interests of the whole, may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.
John C. Calhoun
The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
Immanuel Kant
It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.
Vincent Bugliosi
A former Erdogan ally, Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, since 1999.
Terry Glavin
Many countries, even socialist Sweden and former communist Russia, have done away with their death taxes. They found the confiscation of wealth at death to be counterproductive.
Stephen Moore
It is hardly fair to accuse us of ignorance when it was made a crime under the former order of things to learn enough about letters to even read the Word of God.
George H. White
I’m a former bulimic myself and it’s a horrible, horrible addiction.
Janice Dickinson
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
Alphonse de Lamartine
On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn’t believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.
J. D. Vance
My mom is actually a former prima ballerina, and all the women in my family are associated either with dance or choreography or acting, so I’m very lucky in a way because I grew up in a family of artists. I’ve been dancing since I was a little kid.
Ksenia Solo
Support a compatriot against a native, however the former may blunder or plunder.
Richard Francis Burton
Soon after I returned to private practice, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called me one day.
Fred F. Fielding
I was with the former president for over 54 years. I don’t regret that; I feel very proud. It was necessary. It is history. Each step where we worked together was a privilege, and in terms of history, that was necessary.
Emmerson Mnangagwa
The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.
Ben Macintyre
Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president’s Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it’s unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren’t genuinely motivated by the call to service.
John Sununu
I actually found contracting malaria in the Congo fascinating. Observing your body under attack from this microorganism and seeing how it responds is simultaneously fascinating and awful but maybe that’s just because I’m a former biology teacher.
Jeremy Wade
My late mother moved back to her parents’ homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.
Chrystia Freeland
We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. Lawrence
You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.
Robert Wise
Secularism and pluralism are two of the defining ethos of Western societies. The former decouples religion from governmental institutions whilst the latter seeks to protect the rights of all citizens to freely practice their creed.
Gad Saad
I bought a former library, not because I have a lot of books, but also I like architecture, and it was built in 1965, and I like gardening.
Udo Kier
I work in a studio with lots of young people, most of whom are my former students. We delight in trading YouTube videos! We all stop working to watch them. I’m totally addicted to anything with kittens and puppies, but ‘Very Scared Kid’ is one of my favorites.
Marilyn Minter
Nobody has proved quite as adept as laughing at himself as former President George W. Bush, who willingly conceded to being a class clown, even as a candidate in 1999.
Alex Wagner
Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.
Friedrich Schiller
The former West Germany was a semi-sovereign political

The former West Germany was a semi-sovereign political pygmy, protected by America’s military might and with barely any foreign policy of its own. As a result, the country has no machinery or tradition of strategic thinking, and most Germans are loth to see their government take the lead.
Zanny Minton Beddoes
Former Olympians also get paid to make appearances. Many of them won their medals in an era when Olympic success didn’t go hand-in-hand with financial success.
Mary Lou Retton
He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported with the later.
Henry Fielding
A difference must be made between a decision against the constitutionality of a law of Congress and of a State. The former acts as a restriction on the powers of this government, but the latter as an enlargement.
John C. Calhoun
The charm of Brittany is to be found in the people and in the churches. The former, with their peculiar costumes and their customs, are full of interest, and the latter are of remarkable beauty and quaintness.
Sabine Baring-Gould
I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom – a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training – but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news.
Susan Orlean
Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, each were told repeatedly, ‘You can’t win.’ They all won.
Kellyanne Conway
I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don’t readily advertise themselves unless they’re not living in Moscow, and even then. I’m sure I’ve met some without realizing it.
Jeremy Northam
Slovenia wishes that Montenegro will continue successfully its way towards European integration and will reach peaceful co-habitation with other former Yugoslav peoples within a united Europe.
Janez Drnovsek
As a lawyer and a former prosecutor, I know the limits of the power and authority of the president. I know what is legal and what is not.
Rodrigo Duterte