Clumsy Quotes - Page 6

• You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

  H. G. Wells

  Artist, Wish, Bombs

  H. G. Wells (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)”, p.8287, Delphi Classics

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• Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Ignorance, Two, Scripture

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• I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

  John Ruskin

  Children, Lying, Mean

  John Ruskin (1868). “pt. VI: Of leaf beauty. pt. VII: Of cloud beauty. pts. VIII-IX: Of ideas of relation”, p.278

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• The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type - as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer - an insipid one or a clumsy one - but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years - as producers did - who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

  Ben Hecht

  Girl, Children, Eye

  "Elegy for Wonderland" by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959.

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• I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn't very good-looking. But in his own way he'd always save the day.

  Dave Grohl

  Growing Up, Dolls, Way

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• But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life!

  Anton Chekhov

  Laughter, Reality, Years

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• Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, Style, Kind

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• We were suddenly getting big, with burgeoning capabilities on all sides, but very clumsy, knew we were on some kind of ride, and things changing fast, but with very little idea of what was going on.

  Charles R. Morris

  Ideas, Littles, Sides

  Interview with Bob Morris, bobmorris.biz. December 17, 2012.

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• I have proven a danger to both myself and those around me when carrying these weapons. I'm extraordinarily clumsy.

  Kate Siegel

  Weapons, Danger, Proven

  "Crazy Jewish Mother's Day with Kate Siegel and Kim Friedman". Interview with Penny Mann, www.amazonbookreview.com. April 18, 2016.

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• I was on set [Romeo + Juliet] maybe an hour for two days. It was in this big cathedral in Mexico City. I just remember being up there in the balcony, and it was myself up front and there was a choir behind me. In front of me was this rail, like this cement rail, and I was like, "Oh my gosh!" Because I was a kid then, and I'm like, "We're kinda high ... I hope I don't flip over," because I'm very clumsy.

  Quindon Tarver

  Kids, Cities, Two

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.

  Paul Morley

  Enchantment, Moral, Deceitful

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• There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words.

  Arca

  Frustration, Breathing, Feelings

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

  William Gibson

  Eight, Years, Two

  Source: craphound.com

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• The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

  Hilary Mantel

  Real, Ivy, Effort

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it's far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.

  Ruta Sepetys

  Kindness, Father, Book

  Ruta Sepetys (2011). “Between Shades of Gray”, p.107, Penguin

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• Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

  Robert Smithson

  Eye, Cameras, Faces

  Robert Smithson (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, Univ of California Press

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• When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.

  David A. Bednar

  Believe, Mean, Offending

  "And Nothing Shall Offend Them". David A. Bednar's address at the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, www.lds.org. October 2006.

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• In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.

  Oliver Stone

  Sorry, Regret, Hard Work

  "Oliver Stone: ‘Jewish Domination Of The Media’ Propagates Holocaust Myths". www.huffingtonpost.com. July 26, 2010.

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• But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

  Rick Bragg

  Dream, Book, Years

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• Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.

  Douglas Engelbart

  Organization, Design, Perception

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• I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]

  George R. R. Martin

  Writing, Character, Thinking

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• My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!

  D. H. Lawrence

  Dirty, Cabbage, Juice

  Letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley, 15 August 1928, in H. T. Moore (ed.) 'Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence' (1962) vol. 2

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• Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

  William McKinley

  Long Ago, Competition, Would Be

  William McKinley (2012). “A Supplement to A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents”, p.543, tredition

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• To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

  Mary Stewart

  Sleep, Air, Years

  Mary Stewart (1978). “Hollow Hills”, Fawcett

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• Conservatives say the government can't end poverty by force, but they believe it can use force to make people moral. Liberals say government can't make people be moral, but they believe it can end poverty. Neither group attempts to explain why government is so clumsy and destructive in one area but a paragon of efficiency and benevolence in the other.

  Harry Browne

  Believe, Government, People

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