Top 55 Predecessors Quotes

Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Obama has a strong record on immigration enforcement, outdoing both Republican and Democratic predecessors. He has deported over 1 million immigrants, focusing on those with criminal records. As documented by many nonpartisan sources, by 2011, Obama had reduced illegal immigration crossings to net zero.

I went out of my way to play games I didn’t like or find interesting. Those ended up being a lot more informative for me. At home, I have literally thousands of games, and I think of them as pearls of wisdom from my predecessors.

Business leaders should provide expertise in service of our country. My predecessors at GE have done so, as have leaders of many other great American companies.

To the brains of our predecessors we owe all of our inheritance of civilization and culture.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

In a system of precedent, the new majority bears the weight of explaining why the constitutional vision of their predecessors was flawed and of making the case as to why theirs better captures the meaning of our fundamental law.

Regency buildings are often said to lack the serenity of their early Georgian predecessors, or the intense scholarship of the subsequent Gothic revival.

One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter ‘H’ that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling.

We ship owners and our predecessors, all the way back to the dawn of history, operating in majority on private initiative and at our own risk, have been linking the world together much more effectively than governments ever managed to do or will likely ever be capable of doing.

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.

As an overruling providence may succeed our wishes, let us rear an offspring in every respect worthy to fill the most illustrious stations of their predecessors.

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

I was taught you don’t tell your secrets to strangers – certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.

Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with ‘The Wealth of Nations’; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.

Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.

It is preposterous that the current members of the United States Senate and all of their predecessors for more than 200 years haven’t been able to read the Constitution and do what it says.

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

One of the things about George III is that he was aware that the monarchy was slipping away. There was revolution in the air all over Europe. Because of the unpopularity of his predecessors, one of the things he wanted to do was to establish some sort of credibility to the monarchy.

One of the banners I would put up in front of any American president and new administration is ‘Do not overreact to your predecessors’ policies.’

I’m the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

I’ve covered the league over two decades, I’ve known Bryan Colangelo for a long, long time. He’s not someone who goes on and off the record criticizing his contemporaries or his predecessors.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

The unknown has undone many a president, and no matter the popularity of an Oval Office occupant, any and all presidents are vulnerable. Of course, one thing that seems to set Obama part from his recent predecessors is his ability to keep an inner calm about tough issues.

Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.

It is the natural order of things that successive generations will achieve more than their predecessors.

President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me now. No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.

Through the years you, the Delaware State family and your predecessors, have faced many challenges. You worked through them with fierce determination and good will, and you have made great progress.

I know my predecessors have written a Green Arrow who has a lot of thoughts about social justice, but that was a more evolved, older, wiser Green Arrow.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. ‘YouTube’ was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire ‘troubadours.’ I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L’Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.

We must never take the public’s trust for granted – our predecessors worked hard to earn it, and it is our responsibility to continually earn that trust.

Increasingly, corporate executives who don’t speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.

Don’t speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn’t walk in their shoes.

Vampirism is like celebrity now. Vampires are these eternally young, thin, sexy apparitions of perpetual nightlife and absolutely nothing like their folkloric European boogeyman predecessors. We don’t even make our vampires sleep in coffins anymore, or the ground.

I’ve never been a fan of presidents who place blame on their predecessors or who accept credit for events that couldn’t have been engineered so soon in their tenure.

I will only say that many freedom fighters of India found their calling in the institutions of Britain. And many makers of modern India, including several of my distinguished predecessors, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Dr. Manmohan Singh, passed through their doors.

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else – fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism – then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors.

I don’t aspire to have high approval ratings. I aspire, in light of my two predecessors, to be the most honest governor I can be. I’d rather focus on honesty than popularity.

There are some who expect every game to make a dramatic change the way that ‘Resident Evil 4’ did over its predecessors. And for that series I think the change was fantastic and completely necessary. I honestly think it should have happened much sooner than it did. But that kind of change is not necessary for every game.

With super PACs, we’ve seen voter turnout go up; interest in elections rise; and the number of competitive races increase. The campaigns of 2010 and 2012 have been more issue-oriented than their predecessors, not less.