Joseph J. Ellis Quotes

“Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”

“Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.”

“Try to live with whatever you can afford and avoid putting yourself in an awkward position of thinking how you can afford what you have failed to afford, please free your life on earth.”

“Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.”

“Clarity affords focus.”

“What I see are people who want affordable energy. They want strong environmental standards - they want a lot of things - but first and foremost they want affordable energy. And if you want affordable energy, you want oil, gas and coal.”

“I can't afford to be indifferent to politics, but I don't have personal ambitions.”

“Very few people can afford to be poor.”

“When I told my doctor I couldn't afford an operation, he offered to touch-up my X-rays.”

“The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn't see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.”