E. P. Thompson Quotes

It's easy to be a tough competitor and still be the kind of person with whom people love to compete.

If you always start with the worst hand, you never have a bad-beat story to tell.

When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.

I have always believed in the magic of childhood and think that if you get your life right that magic should never end.

On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free. I gorged myself until my tummy ached.

At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.

You're more than a story.

I love the sea because it is boundless.

Which is scarier-- lust or temptation?

I was grateful for cereal --- the only food that my tummy, riddled by pangs of infatuation, could handle.

Her lips tarried at mine. Baiting each other with the warmth of our breath, barely grazing, detouring, then connecting.

There's no day when I don't think it would be great to be 25 years old and have the Olympics coming in less than 300 days - and be the best in the world. I can't think of anything so motivating.

Ever since I was a kid, whatever situation I was presented with, I always made the most of it.

It's good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.

There are lots of women tennis players, for instance, but because not many of them seem to have much personality, they're interchangeable. You don't have a feeling about them.

In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.

Athletes these days are too robotic. People like to see performances filled with emotion. In my career I tried to be amusing, to differentiate myself from the other champions.

When we stage the Olympics it will inspire kids all over the country. A kid in Scotland or Ireland will be encouraged to take up sport.

When you're walking into the stadium, you just say to yourself, 'the 100m is the same anywhere, the shot put is the same weight anywhere.'

Even if you've been involved in a World Cup, the Olympics is huge. Only the Games has the power to change communities.

I didn't even know what it was when I started. But I was lucky. I found it at 16. Most people don't discover decathlon until they're 21 or 22.

But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it.

I tend to eat vegetables only when I'm with the kids and the rest of the time, I'm a bit slack. But, I am weight-conscious, so I concentrate on avoiding junk food.

I'm obsessive. I want to know the answer to how good I am. Most people aren't.

The stopwatch doesn't lie. The tape measure doesn't lie.

For kids it's natural to be competitive.

The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don't want to go back to the beginning again.

I am only about winning and getting better.

I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year.

Can a president who’s presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?

Experts now talk about the ‘nutrition transition’, in which populations in developing countries move straight from malnourishment to obesity.

Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.

The prices are ridiculous... I don't see how people can go back and forth to work or to school. How can we afford the gas?

Recreation is nothing but a change of work-an occupation for the hands by those who live by their brains, or for the brains by those who live by their hands.

I will hear no talk that there are no intermediate-range weapons on the NATO side.

I don't care tuppence whether I'm forced into a leadership position or not. I'd much sooner not.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too.

What greater restoratives have we poor mortals than a good meal taken in the company of loving friends?

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

Alas! in nature, as in art, we gain only according to our capacity. You cannot put an ocean in a pint pot.

Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.

The luxuries of the few were becoming necessities of the many.

It was ordained that our earthly pilgrammage should be a struggle, and life would be a tame affair if everything went smoothly.

Any artwork needs time and patience and needs above a quiet mind.

A liar did ought to have a good memory.

Strict honesty was the policy of most of them; although there were a few who were said to 'find anything before 'tis lost' and to whom findings were keepings.

Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word, And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird.

The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,Moves all the labouring surges of the world.

In all change, well looked into, the germinal good out-veils the apparent ill.