Contracting Quotes

• When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Father, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.13, Heron Dance Press

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• The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another....We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.

  Gustav Landauer

  Real, Men, Community

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• A shower would minimise the risk of contracting the disease.

  Jacob Zuma

  Risk, Disease, Ridiculous

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• I train myself mentally with visualization. The morning of a tournament, before I put my feet on the floor, I visualize myself making perfect runs with emphasis on technique, all the way through to what my personal best is in practice.... The more you work with this type of visualization, especially when you do it on a day-to-day basis, you'll actually begin to feel your muscles contracting at the appropriate times.

  Camille Duvall

  Motivational, Sports, Running

  Camille Duvall, Nancy Crowell (1992). “Camille Duvall's Instructional Guide to Water Skiing”, p.205, Simon and Schuster

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• By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage.

  Jonathan Sarfati

  Years, Data, Feet

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• It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind or brain-damaged baby (even ten years later when she may be happily married).

  Phyllis Schlafly

  Girl, Baby, Cancer

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• I'm like the universe; either expanding or contracting at any given moment. The most that I had put on was about 35, 36 pounds, and I've taken all of that off.

  Sean Astin

  Taken, Pounds, Moments

  "An Interview with Sean Astin". Interview with Steve Head, www.ign.com. December 18, 2002.

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• An easily accessible and transparent database of contract information will bring sunshine into the confusing and sometimes shadowy practice of government contracting.

  Tom Coburn

  Sunshine, Practice, Government

  "Tracking Federal Hurricane Aid Poses a Challenge" by Associated Press, www.foxnews.com. October 11, 2005.

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• The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.

  Milton Friedman

  Great Depression, Currency, Federal Reserve

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• Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges... And the greatest eulogy we can give it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which two contracting parties always both gain; consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.

  Antoine Destutt de Tracy

  Philosophy, Party, Two

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• Being shelled is the main work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible.

  Louis Simpson

  Lying, War, Mean

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• Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What's in it for me?

  Peter De Vries

  Science, Years, Expanding Universe

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• Pressed up against him, I can feel the thud of his heart against mine, his ribcase expanding and contracting rapidly against my chest, the warm whisper of his breath tickling the side of my neck, the brush of his leg against my thigh. Resting my arms on his shoulders, I pull back a little to get a look at his face. But he isn't smiling any more.

  Tabitha Suzuma

  Heart, Looks, Legs

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• Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Life, Single, Blessing

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (Illustrated)”, p.608, Delphi Classics

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• Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

  Rebecca Solnit

  Communication, Technology, Phones

  Rebecca Solnit (2014). “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness”, p.258, Trinity University Press

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• No man's body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

  John Tillotson

  Strong, Passion, Men

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• My primary goal is really to get people to open up and when they feel themselves contracting and collapsing to reduce that, and to know when that happens, "Oh, something's going on that's making me feel this way, and if I force my body open a bit, I will feel less powerless."

  Amy Cuddy

  People, Goal, Body

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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• I never focus on contraction. I'm focusing on my muscle. I'm not focusing on a certain style of lifting or contracting. I'm just trying to get the weight up. I'm trying to build muscle.

  Ronnie Coleman

  Focus, Style, Trying

  Source: fabodylous.com

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• The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.

  Samuel Johnson

  Anger, Passion, Men

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• Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

  Nancy Mairs

  Law, Use, Our Society

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• All to whom want is terrible, upon whatever principle, ought to think themselves obliged to learn the sage maxims of our parsimonious ancestors, and attain the salutary arts of contracting expense; for without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Thinking, Principles

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.97

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• For many artists the universe is expanding;
  for some it is contracting.

  Robert Smithson

  Artist, Expanding, Universe

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.34, Univ of California Press

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• If you're in the contracting business in this country, you're suspect. If you're in the contracting business in New Jersey, you're indictable. If you're in the contracting business in New Jersey and are Italian, you're convicted.

  Raymond J. Donovan

  Country, Italian, Jersey

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• The core corporation is ... increasingly a façade, behind which teems an array of decentralized groups and subgroups continuously contracting with similarly diffuse working units all over the world.

  Robert Reich

  Groups, World, Corporations

  Robert B. Reich (2010). “The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalis”, p.81, Vintage

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• To sin is to be off the mark, that is, to inhibit development, contracting backward into regression rather than expanding forward into growth.

  Connie Zweig

  Growth, Development, Regression

  Connie Zweig, Steven Wolf (2009). “Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life”, p.64, Wellspring/Ballantine

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