Absence Quotes - Page 14

• One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen.

  Kenneth W. Ford

  Nature, Law, Events

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• What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

  Peter Singer

  Faith, Believe, Argument

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• Nothing good or great can be done in the absence of enthusiasm.

  Tom Peters

  Done, Enthusiasm

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• Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.

  John Stuart Mackenzie

  Democracy, Culture, Tyranny

  "An Introduction to Social Philosophy". Book by John Stuart Mackenzie (p. 383), 1895.

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• For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb

  Powerful, Order, Law

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• The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden...A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cat, Fire, Doe

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• From the Balkans to Africa, from Asia to the Middle East, we have witnessed the weakening or absence of effective governance leading to the ravaging of human rights and the abandonment of longstanding humanitarian principles. We need competent and responsible states to meet the needs of "we the peoples" for whom the UN was created. And the world's peoples will not be fully served unless peace, development and human rights, the three pillars of the UN, are advanced together with equal vigour.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Rights, Together, East

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• As a geologist, I love Earth observations, but it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.

  Harrison Schmitt

  Ties, Government, Data

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• Low-income people everywhere will be at risk of food insecurity due to loss of assets, absence of alternative livelihood options and lack of adequate insurance coverage from extreme weather events.

  Jacques Diouf

  Loss, Weather, People

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• Nights, sweet as they, Made short by lovers play, Yet long by the absence of the day.

  Richard Crashaw

  Love, Sweet, Night

  Richard Crashaw (2013). “Selected Poems”, p.48, Carcanet

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• Friends, though absent, are still present.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Friendship, Absent Friends, Stills

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (1855). “Cicero's Three books of offices, or moral duties: also his Cato Major, an essay on old age; Lælius, an essay on friendship; Paradoxes; Scipio's dream; and Letter to Quintus on the duties of a magistrate”, p.181

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• It is a sign of the times that the absence of meaningful ID requirements in many states leaves our voting process vulnerable to fraud and allows legal votes to be cancelled out by illegally cast ballots.

  Virgil Goode

  Meaningful, Hype, Voting

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• When a faith-healer commands God to perform a miracle, in the absence of a prayer that says, 'Thy will be done,' it is, as far as I am concerned, the most rank form of arrogance . . . The faith-healer Bosworth once said that faith makes God act. If you follow that line of reasoning God is in His heaven, but Bosworth rules the world!

  C. Everett Koop

  Prayer, Miracle, Heaven

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• But even in the absence of direct interference by those who had the power to interfere, the process was usually aborted by the non-availability of one of more elements of the process - the accumulated stock in a money form, the labor-power to be utilized by the producer, the network of distributors, the consumers who were purchasers. One or more elements were missing because, in previous historical social systems, one or more of these elements was not commodified or was insufficiently commodified.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Availability, Missing, Historical

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• Peace is not simply the absence of warfare.

  Pope Paul VI

  Warfare, Catholicism

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• Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.

  Stephen Levine

  Grief, Loss, Rope

  Stephen Levine (2005). “Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart”, p.9, Rodale

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• Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

  Donald Hall

  Grief, Loss, House

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• When we speak of peace, we should not mean just the absence of war. True peace rests on the pillars of individual freedom, human rights, national self-determination, and respect for the rule of law.

  Ronald Reagan

  Determination, Freedom, War

  Ronald Reagan (2004). “Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches”, p.249, Simon and Schuster

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• We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Philosophy, Lying, Justice

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.16, Penguin

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• Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined. So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Love Is, Thinking, White

  "Conversations With God: Book One". Book by Neale Donald Walsch, January 22, 2009.

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• The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Love, Stupid, Army

  War and Peace bk. 9, ch. 11 (1865 - 1869) (translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude)

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• Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

  Cyril Connolly

  Love, Marriage, Parent

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

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• In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education... But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualities which are within easy reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.

  Nelson Mandela

  Love, Life, Family

  "Nelson Mandela's personal letters reveal guilt, anguish and marital spats". www.news.com.au. December 6, 2013.

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• It is an understatement to say that the time has arrived for a serious and open international dialogue regarding the possibility of future interplanetary relations. In no other area of human experience has so much evidence existed for so long, and yet been attended by such a paucity of serious research and analysis - at least in the civilian domain. While the subject matter of UFOs itself is extraordinary, it is the absence of a serious human response to it that is most extraordinary.

  Steven M. Greer

  Long, Analysis, Research

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• That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Pain, Sadness, Space

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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