A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
George Orwell

A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
Joseph Story

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
Mikhail Bakunin

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
H. G. Wells

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett

Avoiding the phrase "I don't have time...", will soon help you to realize that you do have the time needed for just about anything you choose to accomplish in life.
Bo Bennett

But in this Congress, accountability is just a catch phrase, usually directed elsewhere. Demands to personal responsibility or corporate accountability abound, but rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility.
Melissa Bean

But the worst of all is, according to the old phrase, while the grass grows, the horse starves, but the man of money is the man for Nova Scotia. Those may do extremely well.
Nathaniel Smith

Congress seems to believe that 'Children are our future' is a phrase coined by tobacco advertisers.
Jef I. Richards

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can't do that. It's gone, gone forever.
Dan Quayle

Every time I listen back to solos of mine I'll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can't stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don't think so much like that.
John Abercrombie

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
Jhumpa Lahiri

He can thread a needle with a well-turned phrase.
Don Hewitt

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.
John Colville

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.
Jhumpa Lahiri

I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: 'A long time ago, in the future.' Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future.
Romeo LeBlanc

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.
Joe Strummer

I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.
John Cornyn

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.
Golda Meir

I don't think of myself as a character actress - that's become a phrase which means you've had it.
Bette Davis