Definite Quotes - Page 20

• Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavours leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them mentally inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Nothing dulls the mind and soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Men, Expression, Law

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• It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.

  H. L. Mencken

  Law, Voting, Facts

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• A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

  Peter Thiel

  Agency, Over You, Important

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.64, Crown Business

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• Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.

  Paul Tillich

  Anxiety, Phrases, Paradoxical

  Paul Tillich (1968). “The Courage To Be”

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• The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

  Henry James

  Fear, Waiting, Risk

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• Myleene Klass is just the bomb. Her boyfriend is very lucky. She is a definite ten in every sense of the word.

  David Gest

  Luck, Bombs, Ten

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• Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Art, Quality, Copying

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• What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Mean, Way

  Louise Bourgeois, Donald Burton Kuspit (1988). “Bourgeois”, Vintage

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• There is a definite Chinese pop sound developing, but I was shocked at how influenced it is by American music.

  Paul Oakenfold

  Chinese, Sound, Pops

  "The Great Wall of Sound" by Paul Oakenfold, Tom Pattinson, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2007.

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• I had some years of definite frustration. Auditioning and not working as much as I would have liked to, or working and being paid a pittance, and sort of scrounging by in New York and sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed.

  Gillian Jacobs

  New York, Sleep, Frustration

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

  Henry Beston

  Country, Writing, Reality

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• Good acting is about being as natural and calm as possible. These days producers have such definite ideas that you have to be prepared to do whatever they ask.

  Bryn Terfel

  Ideas, Acting, Calm

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• My answer would be definite yes! Destructive atheism, in my view and the view of the Church, is part of a much larger picture - cosmic warfare, that is, between God and Evil, between God and Satan.

  Gerard Verschuuren

  Views, Evil, Atheism

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• God will not force himself upon us against our will. If we want his love, we need to believe in him. We need to make a definite, positive act of commitment and surrender to the love of God. No one can do it for us.

  Billy Graham

  God, Believe, Commitment

  Billy Graham (2003). “Breakfast with Billy Graham: 120 Daily Readings”, Testament

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• Our parents were very strict. Not in a brutal or awful way, but there were definite rules, such as after six on a school night you didn't go out, and at weekends you had to be home by a certain time. It wasn't particularly sheltered, but we were well brought-up.

  Caroline Corr

  Home, School, Night

  Buography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The way you look on the outside has a definite bearing on how you feel and see yourself on the inside.

  Zig Ziglar

  Way, Looks, How You Feel

  Zig Ziglar (1977). “See You at the Top”

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• I wish in my own mind I were more definite - that I was absolutely convinced I'd never direct someone else's script, but I keep reading scripts, because I might find something.

  Paul Mazursky

  Book, Reading, Mind

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• I have nothing definite to apologize for; I'm just sorry about everything in general.

  Ashleigh Brilliant

  Sorry, Apology, Apologizing

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• As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Ideas, Long, Serious

  Shunryu Suzuki (2010). “Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind”, p.100, Shambhala Publications

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• It seems to me the worst possible concept, militarily, that we would simply stay there, resisting aggression, so-called...it seems to me that the way to "resist aggression" is to destroy the potentialities of the aggressor to continually hit you...When you say, merely, "we are going to continue to fight aggression," that is not what the enemy is fighting for. The enemy is fighting for a very definite purpose-to destroy our forces.

  Douglas MacArthur

  War, Fighting, Enemy

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• What I assert and believe to have demonstrated in this and earlier works is that following the finite there is a transfinite (which one could also call the supra-finite), that is an unbounded ascending lader of definite modes, which by their nature are not finite but infinite, but which just like the finite can be determined by well-defined and distinguishable numbers.

  Georg Cantor

  Believe, Numbers, Finite Number

  "Understanding the Infinite". Book by Shaughan Lavine, 1994.

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• Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.

  James Mark Baldwin

  Psychology, Mind

  James Mark Baldwin (1913). “History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation”

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• Anaximenes ... also says that the underlying nature is one and infinite ... but not undefined as Anaximander said but definite, for he identifies it as air; and it differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire; being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these.

  Theophrastus

  Science, Fire, Clouds

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• But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.

  Samuel Alexander

  Real, Elements, Cognition

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• In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Plato, Book, Past

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