Barry Commoner Quotes

In the course of the reform, some new circumstances that we had not anticipated have appeared.

Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.

Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

Nothing ever goes as planned in China.

I think that no relationship goes completely according to plan or the way you wished it had.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

You think that your life is going to be one way, and then, for various reasons or whatever, it doesn't work out.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

It's something you hope doesn't happen. When you sign on to do a job, you hope you'll be able to get it done. But that's not always in your control.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

As far as I'm aware, you can't tell if something is going to be successful. Brilliant scripts often don't get picked up, and terrible ones do all the time!

Crisis is not a nine-to-five job... Crisis happens when you least expect it.

You're not always going to have a perfect day. You're not always going to have the day that you envision.

I was fortunate to go out on my terms while still at the top but a lot of people are not so lucky.

You can't prepare for something that you can't prepare for.

Great power is setting a goal, working hard for it, and achieving it in exactly the way you expected with no consequences and no remainders after the long division is done. But does that happen to anyone? The unexpected always hitches a ride along with everything you planned.

A lot of weird things happen in life that are not always pertaining to your main objective.

Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.

I love stories of love cropping up unexpectedly in life almost as a problem, as something you don't ask for. Something that messes everything up and makes you rethink everything.