Desirable Quotes - Page 19

• They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. What could be more desirable? And they look good in the bargain. Stop chopping down the rain forests and plant more saplings, and we're on our way.

  Isaac Asimov

  Rain, Oxygen, Giving

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• The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

  John Dewey

  Mean, Desire, Used

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Steven M. Cahn (2008). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1938-1939”, p.321, SIU Press

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• Never say never to anything, .. As you get older, being alone isn't very desirable. You want someone to drink your coffee with, to share your television with. I missed male companionship.

  William Joseph Burns

  Coffee, Males, Television

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• Fathers like to have children good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable, but how to put them in that desirable condition is out of their philosophy.

  Ernestine Rose

  Children, Father, Philosophy

  Ernestine Louise Rose (2008). “Mistress of herself: speeches and letters of Ernestine L. Rose, early women's rights leader”, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... Of that which is in mortal in mortals, and possessed of the truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.... Become high uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in as the things of the Godhead.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Moving, Work Out, Shining

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• We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.

  John D. MacDonald

  Imagination, World, Environment

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• Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Country, People, Would Be

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• While it will be desirable to achieve planned results, it will be even more important to avoid unplanned disasters.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Important, Achieve, Disaster

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2015). “The New Industrial State”, p.210, Princeton University Press

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• The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

  Lionel Trilling

  Reality, Class, Differences

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.262, New York Review of Books

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• In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

  Ruth Benedict

  Race, People, Community

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.37, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Political, Reform, Negative

  Charles Horton Cooley (1909). “Two Major Works: Social Organization. Human Nature and the Social Order”, Glencoe, Ill., Free P

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• Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous.

  Dorothy Parker

  Innocence, Ridiculous, Behavior

  Dorothy Parker (2002). “Complete Stories”, p.25, Penguin

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• Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Valueless

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2017). “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, p.72, Princeton University Press

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• With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. They have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.

  James Madison

  Taken, Roots, Public Opinion

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• It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.

  Warsan Shire

  Beautiful, Responsibility, Feminism

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• The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Believe, Fall, Mean

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• The need for a quick, satisfactory copying machine that could be used right in the office seemed very apparent to me-there seemed such a crying need for it-such a desirable thing if it could be obtained. So I set out to think of how one could be made.

  Chester Carlson

  Science, Thinking, Office

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• We must raise the salaries of our operators or they will all be taken from us, that is, all that are good for anything. You will recollect that, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, I took the ground that 'it was our policy to make the office of operator desirable, to pay operators well and make their situation so agreeable that intelligent men and men of character will seek the place and dread to lose it.' I still think so, and, depend upon it, it is the soundest economy to act on this principle.

  Samuel Morse

  Taken, Character, Science

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• I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable.

  Ralph Ellison

  Business, Confusing, Saws

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.193, Vintage

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• You can develop any habit or thought or behavior that you consider desirable or necessary.

  Brian Tracy

  Inspirational, New Year, Behavior

  FaceBook post by Brian Tracy from Dec 30, 2015

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• The condition of women in Islamic societies as a whole is also far from desirable. However, we should acknowledge that there are differences. In certain countries, the conditions are much better and in others much worse.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Country, Islamic, Differences

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, progressive.org. September 1, 2004.

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• All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not. In the same manner, all power, of whatever sort, is of itself desirable. A man would not submit to learn to hem a ruffle, of his wife, or his wife's maid; but if a mere wish could attain it, he would rather wish to be able to hem a ruffle.

  Samuel Johnson

  Knowledge, Men, Wife

  Samuel Johnson (1807). “Dr. Johnson's Table-talk: Containing Aphorisms on Literature, Life, and Manners, with Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, Selected and Arranged from Mr. Boswell's Life of Johnson”, p.76

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• I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century.

  Shinzo Abe

  Country, Believe, Writing

  "A Conversation With Shinzo Abe". Interview with Lally Weymouth, www.washingtonpost.com. April 22, 2007.

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• Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

  Socrates

  Memories, Class, Feelings

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• It is desirable that people make music on the breath, with the breath.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  People, Breaths

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