Quotes About Names

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

There are too many coy books full of talking animals, whimsical children, and condescending adults. (Some of the most famous animals in the world have talked, but they talked real talk and they weren't called silly names like Doody and Mooloo. They were called names like The Cheshire Cat and they asked sensible questions like "Did you say pig, or fig?")

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.

They want to be tied up, I tie them up. They want to be spanked, I spank them. They want to be called names, I call them names. But try and drink a little of their blood, and they scream like babies. What about my needs?

For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to take names in vain. Caste and all its subclassifications are recreated every day in the structure of a conversation that knows which names to name.

When a woman says, 'I don't wish to mention any names', it means it ain't necessary to mention any names.

Doing the movies and meeting the people, and I like the stories of the movies. I like names a lot, too. When I do an audition, there is a script and it has a first page that has the names of all the characters. I'm like, “Let me see that real quick, I wanna see what my name is gonna be.

There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.

Kundalini is the life force. It is given different names. They call it prana. They divide it into different segments, the apana and the samana; sometimes it's called shakti. Nice names, it is energy.

When I was born, my dad and my mom gave me names, but in Africa, when your child is born, especially close family members can suggest names they want to add on.

Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

I've never been in that position in my life, where I hate a celebrity so much that I want to call them names.

The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.

He who retains unchangeable in his heart the rule of the truth which he received by means of baptism will doubtless recognise the names, the expressions, and the parables taken from the Scriptures [by the gnostics], but will by no means acknowledge the blasphemous use which these men make of them.

There are always tons of names on a movie of people that didn't actually do anything on that film. I feel bad for the people that busted their ass because they get the same credit as someone who did nothing. It's kind of a weird thing.

I really cannot understand the point of what you're saying. Really,' said Clotilde, looking at her. 'What a very extraordinary person you are. What sort of a woman are you? Why are you talking like this? Who are you?' Miss Marple pulled down the mass of pink wool that encircled her head, a pink wool scarf of the same kind that she had once worn in the West Indies. 'One of my names,' she said, 'is Nemesis.' 'Nemesis? And what does that mean?' 'I think you know,' said Miss Marple. 'You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.

A lot of celebrities relish politics and are eager to lend their names to candidates and causes. I never wanted to be a spokesman for anybody.

When all else fails the liberals call you names or attack your personality.

The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.

Slavery remained in the Deep South by other names - in prison programs with charges over nothing and eternal debt that threatened every African-American in the South right up through World War II. And that was after killing three-quarters of a million people, destroying cities, and creating hostility that exists to this day over the the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes, all brewing out of bitterness over a war that didn't have to happen.

I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.

I realized that even I have weird intimacy issues with humans - like, I need my friendships to get deeper, I need to be locked in, I need to remember people's names. I know this sounds really stupid, but I just need to be more present in my life.

What is it that dies? A log of wood dies to become a few planks. The planks die to become a chair. The chair dies to become a piece of firewood, and the firewood dies to become ash. You give different names to the different shapes the wood takes, but the basic substance is there always. If we could always remember this, we would never worry about the loss of anything. We never lose anything; we never gain anything. By such discrimination we put an end to unhappiness. (118-119)

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

... if they [your children] write their names in the dust on the furniture, don't let them put the year.

Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs.

I grew up hearing words like snakeroot, sassafras, mullein - things that had wondrous, mysterious sounds in their names.

Yazoo is the name of an old blues label and also a town in America. I like it because it doesn't mean a thing, it has no immediate connotations. That's what I hate about so many names today - they're so obviously fashionable.

The people green-lighting films or TV series often want household names, but the smart ones realize that there are lightning rods who can make things happen, and they aren't necessarily the ones who are celebrated.

The fame of great men ought to be judged always by their big, fancy names.

But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.

Ten thousand officers and men named Smith died in the First World War. One thousand four hundred Campbells died, six thousand Joneses, and one thousand Murphys. Smith, Campbell, Jones and Murphy: the names of the United Kingdom, whose presence in regiments from all four countries speaks of the ebb and flow of peoples within these islands, of a common sacrifice, and a shared agony that burned in so many million hearts down the decades.

It was a hard name having growing up as a child. Some kids would call me names like "Birbiglebug" and "Birbibliography" and "Faggot". Some were more clever than others.

Verily the kindness that gazes upon itself in a mirror turns to stone, and a good deed that calls itself by tender names becomes the parent to a curse.

People's fates are simplified by their names.

He has been known by many names: Lucifer, Beelzabub, Belial, the Prince of Lies, Satan, and at a party once an obnoxious drunk kept calling him "Dude."

Do you know the kind of things that live up there?...things without names 'cause no one who's seen 'em has lived long enough to give them any name besides 'AAAARG!

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.

The Wild Wood is pretty well populated by now; with all the usual lot, good, bad, and indifferent--I name no names. It takes all sorts to make a world.

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

When you live in Mexico, your houses all have names.

If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will -the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.

Those who cultivate moral confusion for profit should understand this: we will name their names and shame them as they deserve to be shamed.

Wherever I go people recognize me, call my name, cheer for me. But there are names no one cares to remember, that no one cheers for: the 805 million people suffering from hunger in the world today.