The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Iris Murdoch

General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.
Irvine Welsh

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa

The cultural contrast I saw between religions... Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. Protestants in general say things to God directly.
Robert Duvall

My father's people... are from Fairfax in northern Virginia, just across the Mason-Dixon line. So it was an honour to play Lee, he was a great general.
Robert Duvall

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.
David Bohm

The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.
Franklin Pierce

I do not intend to dispute in any way the need for defence cuts and the need for government spending cuts in general. I do not share a not in my backyard approach to government spending reductions.
Stephen Harper

The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.
Pierre Bayle

Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does.
Elliott Smith

Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.
George Mason

There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.
Lascelles Abercrombie

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.
Lascelles Abercrombie

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
Lascelles Abercrombie

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
W. Somerset Maugham

My father has a general rule. He says if I haven't done it in real life I shouldn't do it on-screen.
Natalie Portman

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.
George Lucas

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
Jackson Browne