Contrary Quotes - Page 15

• Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any Manner contrary to their conscience.

  James Madison

  Men, Law, Atheism

  James Madison (1999). “Writings”

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• Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  New York, People, Leader

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• But I will plead not guilty until death. I will plead not guilty until there is proof to the contrary.

  Augustin Misago

  Scary, Guilty, Proof

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• It is a Constitution that morphs while you look at it like Plasticman.... That is contrary to our whole tradition, to in God we trust on the coins, to Thanksgiving proclamations, to (Congressional) chaplains, to tax exemption for places of worship, which has always existed in America.

  Antonin Scalia

  America, Scary, Looks

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• Hip-hop is very diverse, but if you only focus on one aspect of it, then what you get is this image of Black America that is completely contrary to what actually goes on.

  Prince

  America, Focus, Hip Hop

  "Tribute to Prince Part 1". The Travis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. April 22, 2016.

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• Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Power, Goal, Suffering

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• Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

  John Henry Newman

  Beautiful, Eye, Men

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• You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Genius, May, Courses

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• A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do. On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people.... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him--after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, People, Genius

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• All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.

  Mark Twain

  Freedom, Blood, Law

  Mark Twain (2017). “The Complete Novels of Mark Twain (Illustrated): 12 American Classics & Author’s Biography: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, A Horse’s Tale, The Prince and the Pauper, The American Claimant, The Mysterious Stranger…”, p.1544, e-artnow

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• You have never by a word or a deed given me one moment's uneasiness; on the contrary I have felt perpetual gratitude to heaven forhaving given me, in you, a source of so much pure and unmixed happiness.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Family, Happiness, Gratitude

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.166, Rowman & Littlefield

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• For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Poetry, Harmony

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12470, Delphi Classics

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• People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Law, People

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12495, Delphi Classics

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• The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,--the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.

  Herman Melville

  People, World, Transcendentalism

  Herman Melville (2017). “Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities”, p.182, W. W. Norton & Company

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• No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Real, Character, Years

  Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Lane, Allen

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• To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, every instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Strong, Teaching, Acceptance

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Ida H. Harper (2017). “The Suffragettes – Complete History Of the Movement (6 Volumes in One Edition): The Battle for the Equal Rights: 1848-1922 (Including Letters, Newspaper Articles, Conference Reports, Speeches, Court Transcripts & Decisions)”, p.3972, e-artnow

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• The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

  James A. Baldwin

  Earth, Weapons, Life Is

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• There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

  Karl Marx

  Party, Hands, Decay

  Karl Marx, David McLellan (2000). “Karl Marx: Selected Writings”, p.368, Oxford University Press, USA

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• With a full century of contrary proof in our possession and despite our demonstrated capacity for cooperative teamwork, some among us seem to accept the shibboleth of an unbridgeable gap between those who hire and those who are employed. We miserably fail to challenge the lie that what is good for management is necessarily bad for labor; that for one side to profit, the other must be depressed. Such distorted doctrine is false and foreign to the American scene where common ideals and purpose permit us a common approach toward the common good.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Teamwork, Lying, Challenges

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• So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT--as his RESISTANCE.

  Laurence Sterne

  Men, Half, Earth

  Laurence Sterne (1849). “The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c. With a Life of the Author Written by Himself”, p.228

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• The bar... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable-and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.

  Luis Bunuel

  Music, Exercise, Dark

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

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• Tis a barbarous temper, and a sign of a very ill nature, to take delight in shocking any one: and, on the contrary, it is the mark of an amiable and a beneficent temper, to say all the kind things one can, without flattery or playing the hypocrite,--and what never fails of procuring the love and esteem of every one; which, next to doing good to a deserving object who wants it, is one of the greatest pleasures of this life.

  Samuel Richardson

  Hypocrite, Want, Next

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• Those commands of superiors which are contrary to our first duties are not to be obeyed.

  Samuel Richardson

  Firsts, Morality, Obedience

  Samuel Richardson (1980). “A collection of the moral and instructive sentiments: a facsimile reproduction”, Scholars Facsimilies & Reprint

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• We can all be good when we have no temptation or provocation to the contrary.

  Samuel Richardson

  Temptation, Goodness, Be Good

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