Conviction Quotes - Page 23

• Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

  John Dos Passos

  Fall, Men, Fire

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• For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Exercise, Views, Law

  "Mr. Justice Frankfurter: 'A Heritage for All Who Love the Law'". Tom C. Clark, "American Bar Association Journal", Volume 51, No. 4, April 1965.

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• The greatest challenge of Leadership maintaining personal conviction in a globalized world.

  Myles Munroe

  Challenges, World, Maintaining

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• Porter Rockwell was that most terrible instrument that can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor a Yankee lumberman; in his memory a Bourbon; in his vengeance an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American continent

  Fitz Hugh Ludlow

  Memories, Powerful, Yankees

  Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1871). “The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, with an Examination of the Mormon Principle”, p.355

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• The enemy advances and you tremble. They've better numbers, you say. Better weapons. Better training. But I do not fear, and neither should you. For what they have in material, they lack in conviction and care. But not us. We have discipline. We have order. And most importantly, we have passion. We believe! So maintain vigilance. Conserve your ammo. Ensure a proper line of sight. And above all else, men, do not fire until you see the whites of their eyes.

  Israel Putnam

  Believe, Eye, Passion

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• This book's title, Rough Beauty , conveys Anderson's conviction that the hard scrabble lives of most of the residents of Vidor, Texas, are worthy of our attention, but it also conveys that he does not seek to beautify their lives by removing the crude edges.

  Anne Wilkes Tucker

  Book, Texas, Titles

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• Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophical, Thinking, Doubt

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.129, Simon and Schuster

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• But if there has been on this earth no real, perfect human life, no love that never cooled, no faith that never failed, which may shine as a loadstar across the darkness of our experience, a light to light amidst all convictions of our own meanness and all suspicions of other's littleness, why, we may have a religion, but we have not a Christianity. For if we lose Him as a Brother, we cannot feel Him as a Saviour.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Brother, Real, Light

  Frederick William Robertson (1873). “Sermons Preached at Brighton”, p.318

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• Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Powerful, Silly, Men

  Stephen Jay Gould (1999). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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• Had not a conviction of the danger to which an unlimited occupation of the executive chair would expose the republican Constitution of our Government, made it conscientiously a duty to retire when I did, the fear of becoming a dotard and of being insensible of it, would of itself have resisted all solicitations to remain.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Government, Occupation, Becoming

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private : Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State”, p.4

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• Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Law, Guilt, Principles

  "Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. March 20, 1961.

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• I'm often asked, Which is more important--attitude or skill? The answer is that it's somewhat like asking which leg of a three-legged stool is most important. It is my complete conviction, based on a considerable amount of research, that if you have the right attitude, combined with the right skills, and build your attitude and your skills on a solid character base, you can enjoy long-lasting success.

  Zig Ziglar

  Attitude, Character, Skills

  Zig Ziglar (1997). “Over the Top: Moving from Survival to Stability, from Stability to Success, from Success to Significance”, p.11, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that 'all things work together for good for those that love Him.

  Dorothy Day

  Kings, Hands, Working Together

  Dorothy Day, Peter Day (1999). “On Pilgrimage”, p.85, A&C Black

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• My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.

  Dorothy Day

  Party, Rejection, Movement

  Dorothy Day, Peter Day (1999). “On Pilgrimage”, p.203, A&C Black

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• Someone once described me as a maverick and that's what I would say. I'm a maverick not by choice but by conviction.

  Van Morrison

  Choices, Maverick

  "Van Morrison: Too Late to Stop Now". Book by Steve Turner, 1993.

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• I am Bourbon as a matter of honour, royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character.

  François-René de Chateaubriand

  Character, Matter, Taste

  "De la restauration et de la monarchie élective". Book by François-René de Chateaubriand, 1831.

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• It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us.

  Tertullian

  Nature, Men, Religion

  Tertullian (2012). “The Sacred Writings of Tertullian (Annotated Edition)”, p.247, Jazzybee Verlag

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• still hope leads men to venture; and no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design.

  Thucydides

  Men, Design, Inward

  Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert B. Strassler (2008). “The Landmark Thucydides”, p.181, Simon and Schuster

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• Inquire, investigate, doubt yourself and others. To find truth, you must not cling to your convictions; if you are sure of the immediate, you will never reach the ultimate. Your idea that you were born and that you will die is absurd – both logic and experience contradict it.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Ideas, Doubt, Logic

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• I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.

  Norman Mailer

  Strong, People, Feelings

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• There are ten church-members by inheritance for one by conviction.

  Austin O'Malley

  Church, Inheritance, Members

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• Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

  Alain de Botton

  Philosophy, Able, Hysterical

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

  Alain de Botton

  Optimistic, Frustration, Rage

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, 2000.

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• The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Long, Young, Humans

  Theodore Sturgeon (1965). “More Than Human”

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• Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Children, Discipline

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