Defective Quotes - Page 5

• A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Faults, Reason, Instruments

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• My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Children, Sensual, Adults

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• It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the Scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness. But if we had no divine instruction on the subject, our own interest would demand of us a strict observance of the principle of these injunctions. . . .

  Noah Webster

  Hate, Men, Views

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• My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Air, Space, Analysis

  Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Bissell Carroll (1964). “Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf”, p.135, MIT Press

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• Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Philosophy, Reality, Squares

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• We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy in America.

  Norman Cousins

  Philosophy, Mistake, America

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• Has God no living church? He has a church, but it is the church militant, not the church triumphant. We are sorry that there are defective members, that there are tares amid the wheat. . . . Although there are evils existing in the church, and will be until the end of the world, the church in these last days is to be the light of the world that is polluted and demoralized by sin. The church, enfeebled and defective, needing to be reproved, warned, and counseled, is the only object upon earth upon which Christ bestows His supreme regard.

  Ellen G. White

  Sorry, Light, Evil

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• Has God no living church? He has a church, but it is the church militant, not the church triumphant. We are sorry that there are defective members. . . . While the Lord brings into the church those who are truly converted, Satan at the same time brings persons who are not converted into its fellowship. While Christ is sowing the good seed, Satan is sowing the tares. There are two opposing influences continually exerted on the members of the church. One influence is working for the purification of the church, and the other for the corrupting of the people of God.

  Ellen G. White

  Sorry, Two, People

  Ellen G. White (2013). “Our Father Cares”, Review and Herald Pub Assoc

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• It is more often from pride than from defective understanding that people oppose established opinions: they find the best places taken in the good party and are reluctant to accept inferior ones.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Party, Taken, Pride

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• Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.

  Hermann Minkowski

  Color, Heaven, Arrogance

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• I've always said, 'I am a selector, I am not defector' - the first few phrases in English I learned. I said I hate 'defector'; something defective about the people. It's a bad word.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Hate, People, Phrases

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• The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Character, Purpose

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, A.V. Miller (tr.) (1998). “Phenomenology of Spirit”, p.25, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

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• The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.

  James Martineau

  Inspiration, Men, Doubt

  James Martineau (1905). “Tides of the Spirit: Selections from the Writings of James Martineau”

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• At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop.

  Jean Piaget

  Past, Men, Law

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• A newspaper is a mirror reflecting the public, a mirror more or less defective, but still a mirror.

  Arthur Brisbane

  Mirrors, Newspapers, Reflecting

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• I am very defective in all duties... In prayer I wander and am formal... I soon tire; devotion languishes; and I do not walk with God.

  William Carey

  Prayer, Missionary, Tire

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• We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion.

  Molly Ivins

  Country, Years, Oil

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• Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.

  Ernst Mach

  Life, Math, Circles

  Ernst Mach (2012). “Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry”, p.45, Springer Science & Business Media

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• To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?

  William Carlos Williams

  Dog, Mean, Tree

  1946 Paterson, bk.1, preface.

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• In a fast, the body tears down its defective parts and then builds anew when eating is resumed.

  Herbert M. Shelton

  Tears, Body, Eating

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• This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.

  Pope John Paul II

  Roots, Civilization, Economic Inequality

  Pope John Paul II (1996). “The Encyclicals of John Paul II”, Our Sunday Visitor (IN)

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• The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts.

  Herbert Spencer

  Skills, Political, Humanity

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• Boys get unfairly labeled as morally defective, hyperactive, undisciplined, or 'problem children,' when quite often the problem is not with the boys but with the families, extended families, or social environments, which do not understand their specific needs as human beings and as boys

  Michael Gurian

  Children, Boys, Needs

  Michael Gurian (2000). “The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of Our Boys and Young Men”, p.53, Penguin

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• Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.

  Margaret Sanger

  Weed, Latin, Flower

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• No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

  Margaret Sanger

  Children, Parent, Healthy

  Margaret Sanger (2005). “Woman and the New Race”, p.89, Cosimo, Inc.

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