Before Quotes

What drew me to politics in the first place was the fact that I wanted to have a place to take a stand and use my voice to express what I believed in. But I've no longer got any political aspirations. I feel that as a politician, fifty per cent of people would hate you before you even left the house.

I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.

The only thing I have no control over is the politics that goes on within the record company. It's always been the same, but it's far tougher now, because record companies are run by financial people; before, they were run by creative people.

I have always been interested in politics. I was in the student union before, very active.

I'm very literate on policy. I'm very literate on the issues, and I'm an American first. I've been involved in politics long before I was an actress. I just happen to have a platform now. I just happen to have a voice.

Before I got into politics, I wanted to be a missionary to people in the Middle East. I thought it would be better to speak with them in their own language.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.

I think peace should be done not only among governments but among people. It was impossible before the Facebook.

Before, for me, peace could have been synonymous with boredom.

We have a long way to go before we are able to hear the voices of everyone on earth, but I believe that providing voices and building bridges is essential for the World Peace we all wish for.

But I try to steal other moments. Sometimes I get up very early in the morning and enjoy a quiet house and cup of tea before the craziness begins. Other times, I'll take a quick walk on the beach. You can find peace in a few minutes.

Put a bridle on thy tongue; set a guard before thy lips, lest the words of thine own mouth destroy thy peace... on much speaking cometh repentance, but in silence is safety.

I wish to assure you that there can never be any return to the state of armed conflict which existed before our commitment to peace and the democratic process of election under the Lancaster House agreement.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

I found myself in a race with Mother Nature to play as much baseball as I could before she forced me to stop.