Names quotes
7.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside names — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"When I heard the truth about my name was not Cassius Clay, like I knew a black man in America named John Hawkins. Now, you know who John Hawkins was.He was a slave trader from England. But the white people of that time, if one had five slaves and his name was Jones, they would be called Jones' property. [...] Now that I'm free, now that I'm no longer a slave, then I want a name of my ancestors."
"Religions all have different names, but they all contain the same truths. ... I think the people of our religion should be tolerant and understand people believe different things."
"In one way or another, I always marked my pictures. But there were times when I put my signature on the back of the canvas. All my works from the cubist period, until about 1914, have my name and the date on the back side of the stretcher. I know someone spread the story that in Céret, Braque and I decided not to sign our pictures anymore. But that's just a legend!"
""Picasso" is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance."
"People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything."
"I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name."
"To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver."
"And we have made of ourselves living cesspools, and driven doctors to invent names for our diseases."
"Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences."
"I paint and I draw and I write and I do other things too, and recently some people at school were asking if I'd ever publish any of my work. But I almost feel like I would have to publish it under another name because there's a definition of me out there that feels kind of stuck in the moment when it was formed."
"Taylor is a musician who does things under her own name and tells her own stories-her songs and her albums are her."
"Every court of criminal justice must have the power of correcting the greatest and dangerous of all abuses of the forms of law - that of the protracted imprisonment of the accused, untried, perhaps not intended ever to be tried, it may be, not informed of the nature of the charge against him, or the name of the accuser."
"It's not fair that our name can be used in any newspaper, any article connected with anything, and we can't really fight about it. It's like any newspaper that might take a picture of you, bad or good, and sometimes they're awful pictures, and they can use them without your approval and you can't do anything about it."
"I'm a very hands-on person; I don't just want to give my name to something and not be a big part of it."
"I could name about a dozen paths, and you'd like to have a whole bunch of research on all those paths, and then, eventually, at least four to five companies with really significant financing try and get to big scale, going down and really trying to prove it out."
"Done so many evil things in the name of love, it's a crying shame. I never did see no fire that could put out a flame."
"It would seem that men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can hate one another. Once it was religion. Now it is the State."
"National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right."
"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"
"Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers."
