Last Quotations

In matters of conscience, first thoughts are best. In matters of prudence, last thoughts are best.

I can't believe it. I'm speechless. It is amazing to see where I've come from the last two years.

Cerner's focus over the last 20 years has been to provide healthcare, predominately healthcare providers, with advanced clinical and management information systems. Our mission is to connect the appropriate persons, knowledge, and resources at the appropriate time and location to achieve the optimal health outcome.

I took a little break - I was coming back to work and the last thing I was going to do was take a step backwards, so I knew that if I was going to take a feature it was going to have to be taking a step forward.

To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat. The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by.

Lana Turner was adorable and funny. Jimmy Stewart was such a nice person. I quickly realized that if you're not a nice person, you're not going to last in this business. I mean, once your box office starts to drop off, like Veronica Lake, they'll get rid of you fast.

I'm such a bad shopper for myself. I love fashion and all that kind of stuff, but that's sort of the last thing I want to do when I'm done with a film is go shopping. I want to just chill.

I want a car that will last 10 years or longer because I totally hate the process of researching, shopping for a new car, and then haggling for the price. I wish I could just snap my fingers and my car is there.

Russia does not have a modern economy: it's a petro-power. The only thing it sells that the world wants to buy is oil and natural gas. When was the last time anyone bought a Russian computer? A Russian car? A Russian cell phone? Russia is so dependent on high energy prices that if oil falls below $100 a barrel, the Kremlin can't meet payroll.

My greatest desire as an actor is to keep people guessing and not do anything close to what I did last time.

We shall fight to the last to free our Motherland.

Within the last three years the amount of classified materials has doubled to 15.6 million decisions to classify documents.

Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

My formative years were in Houston. I was in middle school, and everyone was dropping the last half of their names and adding an 'o' to the end. My little crew that I had, we were an all-female rap group, and everyone had an 'o' at the end of their name. I was Lisso. Then this dude started getting lazy with it, saying Lizzo.

With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years, I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind, even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.

I had no money nor friends to prepare for the trial till last night.

I'm a De Niro fan. I went eleven years without seeing a movie; the last one before that, February 1980, was De Niro and Scorsese in 'Raging Bull,' and when I went back, it was 'Cape Fear,' with De Niro and Scorsese. I picked up right where I left off at.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I did this book 'Harvest for Hope,' and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

When you share your last crust of bread with a beggar, you mustn't behave as if you were throwing a bone to a dog. You must give humbly, and thank him for allowing you to have a part in his hunger.

As a child, I always wanted to be the last one to take a bath because I knew I could close the door and spend hours just having my bath and singing.

It takes a lot of experience of life to see why some relationships last and others do not. But we do not have to wait for a crisis to get an idea of the future of a particular relationship. Our behavior in little every incidents tells us a great deal.

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.

I did three of the original 'Twilight Zone' episodes, yes. Also, I did a little thing in the feature film, and then I wrote one of the episodes in 'The Twilight Zone's last round where I starred with Cloris Leachman and my daughter Liliana in a true sequel to 'It's a Good Life.' So, yes, I have a good 'Twilight Zone' alumni jacket.

For the good producer, raising capital is about the last thing to worry about. If you're good, the money comes very easily.

Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

You know what they call the fellow who finishes last in his medical school graduating class? They call him 'Doctor.'

'In the Wake' was a very bleak book. This relationship was not too good, the father and son. This time around, I wanted a father and a son who really loved each other, which would be visible on the first page and would still be there on the last page.

The last thing left in nature is the beauty of women.

In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ's hands and feet and the spear wound in his side.

One of the problems we saw in the last presidential election in our party is that our nominee, while winning the election, which we ought never to forget, often lost sight of the difference between strategy and tactics.

Have you ever thought about those last moments of your life? Nobody wants a long, lingering illness; nobody wants just that; but it would be nice if you could have a day or two where you know it's coming.

A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration.

Wimbledon 2014 will be my last slam. To be honest, I am already starting to miss professional tennis, having played at the highest level for two decades. It is what has given me my identity, and I will miss every bit of the action. The thought that I will not be playing anymore is daunting.

When one knows at an early age that their gift, talent and direction is musical, one tends to focus on that and let nothing interfere or impede the forward motion toward the end of that rainbow. And after 50-something years of rockin' out, you still realise there is no end to that distant rainbow until one's last sunset.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

My feelings, as the last ball travelled over the net, and as I realized that the final match was mine, I cannot describe. I felt that here was a prize for all the games I had ever played.

Last year was a tough decision for me, to end my season so short. But it was the right decision for me, because right now I feel great. I can go out here and sprint full speed right now, but I'm just going to pace myself for April 5.

Covering Richard Nixon's triumphant run in 1968 turned out to be my last major assignment as a general correspondent for CBS News. In September of that year, '60 Minutes' made its debut and I began the best, the most fulfilling job a reporter could imagine.

I've always been blessed with confidence. I am a glass-half-full person. My first movie, 'Private Benjamin,' got turned down by every studio until the very last one, but I just kept thinking, 'Why are you people not seeing that this is a hit movie? What is wrong with you?'

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

Youth is seen as everything. You don't know anything when you're young. It's great being older, just having a more balanced perspective. I wake up and realise that what seemed to be important last year no longer is. I'm increasingly grateful for every day.

My role is Katara: in 'The Last Airbender,' I'm a water bender from the southern water tribe, and my character is really strong but also loving.

Whenever I start a 'Potter' film, I get these dreams. The last dream I had, I was in a war and the sky was blotted with broomsticks and I couldn't find my wand. It was so intense. I always have mental, intense, war wizard dreams when I'm doing the films.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

That last winter was a tragic story and I got no personal honour out of it but I was a witness to it.

I think the last album I bought was a very beautiful album called 'Lost Wisdom' by Mount Eerie featuring Julie Doiron, and I bought it direct from Phil Elverum via his website. It's cool you can do that now with the Internet.

In an instant, the law was transformed: from the last passenger on the safe-haven bandwagon to a pioneer into uncharted territory. For the first time in American history, it was not only legal to relinquish a baby; in Nebraska, it was okay to abandon any child of any age for any reason at any time - with the full protection of the law.

From 1949 to 1953, I studied towards the diploma in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Polytechnical School in Zurich. It is in the last year of this study that I made my first contacts with fundamental research, when working on the isolation and characterization of a new isomer of Cl34 with a half-life of 1.5 seconds.

It takes a long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth.

Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologize?'

You gotta learn that if you're gonna take the last shot of the game, it's either gonna go in, or it's not gonna go in, and you're either gonna be the hero or the goat.

As we continue to fight the war on terror, we express our gratitude to our troops whose valor over the last three years provided freedom to the Iraqis, while protecting our liberty here at home.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

Last time I blushed was when I smoothed my hands over the back of my dress and actually touched skin. Seems the material was tucked into my underwear, and everyone around me had gotten a show. This, of course, was at a romance writers' conference.

We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future.

I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements.

I gave my last concert in 1976. For 32 years, I had given everything I had. I wanted to stop. My last big debut was in Russia in 1973. After I retired, I didn't have to worry about going out in bad weather. I could stay up late.

I grew up in Texas, but that was 20 years ago. Last year, in Fort Worth, they had hail the size of softballs. We're seeing more and more powerful storms, of all types, almost on a biblical level.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.

There's a cumulative effect to getting good parts as a freelance actor, because you're only as good as your last job, and you have to keep going out and getting them. Unless you're part of the finance structure, by which I mean a bankable star, which I never was and never will be.

The scene we shot with Charlie Rose was actually the last piece that was ever shot for 'Breaking Bad.' My daughter and I flew to New York; we got to shoot in the 'Charlie Rose' studio. Adam Godley and Jessica Hecht are such expert performers that we were able to get it very beautifully and very quickly.

Let's face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it's like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette.

I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

I do love to capture beauty in this world. And photos can last the test of time.

I like England more than I did when I left. It's become a bit of a better country in the last ten years, in the attitude of it. A bit more Americanized, which is both good and bad. At least when you order a cup of coffee they don't give you a hard time.

I'm always nervous! Especially when it comes to a series like 'Disgaea', where you do have such a devoted fan base, the last thing you want to do is disappoint. But I love playing bad guys and just always hope that fans will be forgiving if I miss the mark.

There's always a sense of tragedy with icons. It happened to both the Princess of Wales and Diana Dors. A lot of people had grown up with them, and everybody loved them. Then, when they had at last found happiness, they were taken in the most dreadful way.

Your employer is the last person you should want to provide for your healthcare, from a privacy, financial, and value standpoint. Employees with families should get the family, meaning spouses and children, off the company plan. In most cases, that will save them money.

I visited the Chinese side last year. The Chinese are in a constant state of military readiness. They have all their nuclear weapons in the area, presumably trained on targets across the border.

War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway.

As attorney general, I've had some connection with just about every important public issue in the last eight years in Kentucky. All of the important public issues of the day have, at some point.

I am confident that this legislature will rise above partisan bickering, especially after the public promises its members made last fall, and that it will demonstrate a high capacity for civil service.

Only to he avoid misunderstandings, I must say that even last year, when I wrote my pamphlet, I heartily wished that Prussia should declare war against Napoleon.

The Antichrist will be the infernal prince again for the third and last time... so many evils shall be committed by the means of Satan, the infernal Prince, that almost the entire world shall be found undone and desolate. Before these events happen, many rare birds will cry in the air, 'Now! Now!' and sometime later will vanish.

I saw 'Food, Inc.' last night - it was like a horror movie. I'm definitely thinking about my food supply now and how I want to grow my own.

I suppose I will go on selling newspapers until at last will come the late night final.

I've been collecting articles on extremophile bacteria for at least the last ten years. I find them fascinating, whether they live in boiling pools at Yellowstone, around thermal vents at the floors of the oceans, or on Mars, where NASA has been searching for them as the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

'Wicked Nights' is the story of Zacharel, the new leader of the Army of Disgrace - heavenly warriors in danger of falling from grace - and Annabelle, a human who has spent the last four years locked in an institution for the criminally insane.

Today, the Federal minimum wage purchases less than it has at any point in the last 50 years. Let me repeat: The Federal minimum wage purchases less than it has at any point in the last 50 years.

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.

At the age of nine, I could cross the length of Glasgow on a succession of buses, wearing regulation garter-topped stockings and compulsory cap and - if I'd done well enough to earn the honour in last week's test - with a First World War medal on a striped ribbon pinned to my brown blazer. I must have looked like a chocolate soldier.

The history of Europe over the last several centuries provides clear evidence of the transformative power of commerce.

I can't think of any NBA team over the last few years that lost three starters. And we replaced them basically with three guys who really haven't played in this league.

I often think to myself, at the end of an interesting life it's maybe not such a bad thing to spend your last days with your friends sitting by the blue, blue ocean reliving the story of your life while sitting in the dangerous sun.

Pretty much every weekend, my wife and I have the shall-we-live-in-the-country conversation. I suppose it's something to do with getting older and feeling I want to shed some of the things I've been doing for the last 20 years and go back to my roots.

I shot all my stuff on 'Arrested Development' in one day, and was brought into a really well-oiled machine. 'Cause it was the last season, and they were wrapping up a lot of stuff because they knew at that point that they weren't coming back. There seemed to be kind of a freedom, and certainly the cast had a great amount of camaraderie.

With some artists, I've noticed that after their songs have been licensed, on their next album you can totally hear they're trying to write a song for 'Grey's Anatomy' and it doesn't work. It's just one of those things that has to feel genuine to last a long time.

I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

I was trying to be 27 at age 47, but God had to get rid of my vanity. I had trouble letting go of the old Lex physically. My human fleshly nature didn't want to let go of what had come to be billed as 'The Total Package.' I guess God had to help me get rid of the last remnant of that vanity and pride.

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony.

I have to take the positives from 2012 and the negatives as well because you learn more than you do from the positives. It has been a great season last year, a lot of learning, and now it's another approach. The way I will approach this year is totally different, so we are ready to fight for it.

I definitely learned to appreciate there is something about looking good. I think it's been sort of lost in the last 50 years, this idea of looking very nice and very put together.