Should Have Been Quotes

I was not really as good as I should have been.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Journalists should have been the first to tell people what Obamacare would mean to them. They are now the last to figure all of this out.

There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.

There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn’t known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. ‘This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?’ So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

[Sheehan] deserves some consideration, and I think that should have been done right from the beginning.

I think that there’s part of me that feels like maybe I should have been more social.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

When I asked the president [Barack Obama], can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It’s an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal no. The president’s response, he hasn’t killed anyone yet.

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

I failed to fulfill what should have been an interesting role. I couldn’t take their formula and bring what I had, my humor, my ideas, and make it my own.

The result of Hillary Clinton misconduct was the release of thousands and thousands of dangerous criminal aliens who should have been sent home to their countries. Instead we have them all over the place.

We are living in a new ice age, and we need to apply the recipes of the Cold War to the Kremlin. That means isolation instead of offers of negotiation. And Ukraine should have been supplied with weapons long ago.