Top 40 Would-Be Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Would-Be Quotes from famous people such as Peter Bergen, Gary Hamel, Maria Konnikova, James Broughton, Linwood Barclay, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks

When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.
Peter Bergen
It’s not unusual for a would-be entrepreneur to get turned down half a dozen times before finding a willing investor – yet in most companies, it takes only one ‘nyet’ to kill a project stone dead.
Gary Hamel
As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.
Maria Konnikova
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
James Broughton
Even if I couldn’t get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there’s a better school for would-be novelists, I don’t know what it is.
Linwood Barclay
Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.
Alex Berenson
There is no greater way to ensure that universities remain a hotbed of leftist thought than to guarantee that professors knight their own successors. But that’s basically how the Ph.D. system works, with sitting professors approving the work of would-be professors.
Ben Shapiro
The field of ageing research is full of characters. We have hucksters claiming that cures for ageing can be bought and sold; prophetic seers, their hands extended for money, warning that immortality is nigh; and would-be Nobelists working methodically in laboratories in search of a pill to slow ageing.
S. Jay Olshansky
Abstract Expressionism – the first American movement to have a worldwide influence – was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you’ll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends’ parents who would shake their children’s hands at bedtime.
Ezekiel Emanuel
On our watch, the conversation with a would-be suicide bomber will not begin with the words, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’
Mitt Romney
Would-be adoptive parents have to struggle for years through a bureaucratic obstacle course at an average cost of $30,000.
Foster Friess
I think the best thing I’ve written is a story called ‘The Boxer and the Blonde.’ It’s a piece about Billy Conn, the white would-be heavyweight champion of the world, who lived in Pittsburgh.
Frank Deford
Once you’ve published a few books, you drag around this ball and chain of a back list. All the evidence of how few you’ve sold is there. I think a lot of writers my age have this strange experience of going from would-be to has-been.
Geoff Dyer
Would-be terrorists cannot so much as board a plane without a thorough screening, yet we give them nearly unfettered access to very dangerous weapons.
George Takei
All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.
John Burroughs
Our enemies and our would-be enemies are working very hard at cyberterrorism… They’re trying to level the playing field because they know they can’t beat us tank for tank, plane for plane.
Curt Weldon
After high school, I worked as a messenger boy at a local bank. I was miserable. I felt like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham’s dungeon. As a would-be writer, I thought it was a catastrophe. As a bank employee, I could barely add or subtract and had to count on my fingers.
Lloyd Alexander
Guantanamo Bay houses enemy combatants ranging from terrorist trainers and recruiters to bomb makers, would-be suicide bombers, and terrorist financiers.
Chris Chocola
You know, there are a lot of would-be governors of Texas sitting around today who never took the opportunity to get into a race when the time was right.
Laura Bush
Everyone who has felt alienated by the games industry, both would-be players and creators, needs to rally together and support one another as we create a space for those of us who don’t fit in traditional spaces.
Zoe Quinn
An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.
Gore Vidal
I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.
Sidney Sheldon
In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to ‘tell stories,’ narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.
Michelle Dean
I’m a frustrated would-be architect who stumbled into the would-be business of making movies.
Michael Cimino
I think it goes without saying that young would-be playwrights in developmental workshops should be so lucky as to write plays as good as ‘Waiting for Godot,’ ‘Uncle Vanya’ or ‘King Lear,’ none of which would have existed without a decent plot.
Theresa Rebeck
As a kid, I watched ‘Bugs Bunny’ cartoons, and for some reason Pepe Le Pew, the indomitable French skunk pursuing his would-be kitty paramour, left his mark on me: became an instant emblem of odoriferous hubris, hedonistic bad behavior. He was an entry-level Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a rookie Marquis de Sade.
Michael Paterniti
The ‘Vampire of Ropraz’ claims to be based on a true story, but the name of Rosa’s father matches that of a notable Swiss artist and restorer. The eventual suspect has the overlong teeth and shambling menace of a would-be vampire, but Chessex leaves the real possibility of his guilt an open question.
Sarah Weinman
Scales aren’t just for all the would-be pastry wizards out there, either. They’re a necessary tool for any serious cook as well, especially for determining ratios or servings.
Sohla El-Waylly
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.
John Updike
Trade accords had been a staple of the post-World War II world, providing a mechanism for economic growth, development, and association with friends and allies, and a means of reining in would-be adversaries who otherwise would have little incentive to act with restraint.
Richard N. Haass
The only way governments or would-be governments respon

The only way governments or would-be governments respond to ills these days is by seeking to lower the temperature… and that tends to mean public spending.
Emmanuel Macron
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley’s would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Vaclav Smil
I do believe that we should keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, would-be terrorists, and a lot of other people.
Richard Shelby
Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood’s ‘Glen or Glenda’ and ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space,’ or big-budget misfires like the 1987 ‘Ishtar,’ a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia.
Richard Corliss
Big companies often use their leverage to take stakes in would-be suppliers, especially in the technology business.
Alex Berenson
Our view has been that unless stringent environmental tests can be passed by would-be frackers, then no fracking should take place.
Barry Gardiner
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.
Aberjhani
Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.
Alissa Quart
I feel that there’s a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.
Jay McInerney