Blight Quotes - Page 2

• Blight has descended on our regulatory agencies - and a dry rot, beginning in Washington, is seeping into every corner of America - in the payola mentality, the expense account way of life, the confusion between what is legal and what is right.

  John F. Kennedy

  Agency, America, Confusion

  Address of Senator John F. Kennedy accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California, www.jfklibrary.org. July 15, 1960.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain.

  Charles Dickens

  Grief, Rain, Air

  Charles Dickens (1870). “Novels”, p.38

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Art, Islands, Doe

  Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the medieval mind blamed God for human suffering, so the modern mind blames 'the system' for the industrial blight and plague of technology.

  Jennifer Stone

  Technology, Mind, Suffering

  10 Copy quote

• It is quite easy to debase the sport, change its values, dilute its ethics and destroy its traditional associations with quietness, relaxation and the opportunity to think. Angling is not a competitive sport. The fisherman'- s only real competition is with his quarry and his only real challenge is the challenge to himself. Nothing can add to this, but the blight of interhuman competition can certainly detract from it.

  Roderick Haig-Brown

  Sports, Real, Opportunity

  12 Copy quote

• How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

  James F. Cooper

  Character, Men, Selfishness

  18 Copy quote

• Travelers describe a tree in the island of Java whose pestiferous exhalations blight every tiny blade of grass within the compass of its shade. So it is with despotism.

  Giovanni Ruffini

  Islands, Tree, Java

  Giovanni Ruffini (1857). “Doctor Antonio: a tale of Italy”, p.295

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Proportion, Centralization, Found

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

  Margaret Fuller

  Growth, Might, Soil

  Margaret Fuller, Arthur Buckminster Fuller (1874). “Woman in the 19th century, and kindred papers relating to the sphere, condition, and duties of woman”, p.47

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As frost to the bud, and blight to the blossom, even such is self-interest to friendship; for confidence cannot dwell where selfishness is porter at the gate.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Self, Frost, Bud

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1851). “Proverbial philosophy”, p.202

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Where LGBT and mental health issues collide is over stigma. And stigma is society's problem not the problem of the LGBT or mental health community. What we have to deal with is the ignorance, fear and prejudice that blight the lives of those who have nothing wrong with them in any moral or transgressive sense. It is society that is ill.

  Stephen Fry

  Ignorance, Issues, Community

  10 Copy quote

• But most thro' midnight streets I hear
  How the youthful Harlots curse
  Blasts the new-born Infants tear
  And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

  William Blake

  Children, Abuse, Tears

  William Blake (1971). “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, p.27, Library of Alexandria

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.

  Pauline Kael

  Mean, San Francisco, Invasion

  pauline kael (1965). “i lost it at the movies”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's a segment of this world, there's a mind state that's permeated the intellectual consciousness of this world that comes from a certain type of people that looks at me and you and your average individual as a problem - like a blight on an otherwise potential paradise, something that needs to be cured.

  El-P

  Average, People, Intellectual

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anti-social behaviour still blights lives, wrecks communities and provides a pathway to criminality.

  Theresa May

  Community, Pathways, Behaviour

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.

  Clarence John Laughlin

  Thinking, Imagination, Acting

  Clarence John Laughlin, Lafcadio Hearn, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1973). “Clarence John Laughlin: the personal eye”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.

  Neil Postman

  Teacher, Mind, Enemy

  Neil Postman (2011). “The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School”, p.116, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.

  Joseph Conrad

  Lying, Men, Waiting

  Joseph Conrad (2010). “Lord Jim”, p.112, Bibliolis Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.

  Daniel Taylor

  Religious, Years, Two

  7 Copy quote

• [T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you'll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we're bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we're good. And real-world policy - policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families - is being built on that foundation.

  Paul Krugman

  Real, People, Trying

  14 Copy quote

• Environmental pollution is a blight on people's quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts.

  Li Keqiang

  Life, Heart, People

  "China sets 7 per cent growth target, but challenges lie ahead". "PM", www.abc.net.au. March 5, 2015.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Long time a child, and still a child, when years Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I; For yet I lived like one not born to die; A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears— No hope I needed, and I knew no fears. But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep—and waking, I waked to sleep no more; at once o'ertaking The vanguard of my age, with all arrears Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man, Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is gray, For I have lost the race I never ran. A rathe December blights my lagging May: And still I am a child, though I be old Time is my debtor for my days untold.

  Hartley Coleridge

  Sweet, Children, Sleep

  Hartley Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge (1851). “Poems”, p.13

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hide in your heart a bitter thought, Still it has power to blight; Think Love, although you speak it not It gives the world more light.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Inspirational, Heart, Thinking

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2016). “Complete Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Delphi Classics)”, p.1153, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

  Kate Millett

  Human Condition, Humans, Know How

  Kate Millett (1975). “Flying”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Children, Slave Girl, Waiting

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.15

  13 Copy quote

  Show source