Difficult Quotes - Page 14

• The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.

  Ken Livingstone

  Friday, Country, Cities

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• Endure what is difficult to endure and to suffer what is difficult to suffer.

  Hirohito

  Suffering, Endure

  1945 Declaration, 15 Aug. Quoted in Hugh Cortazzi The Japanese Achievement (1990).

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• Financial markets are supposed to swing like a pendulum: They may fluctuate wildly in response to exogenous shocks, but eventually they are supposed to come to rest at an equilibrium point and that point is supposed to be the same irrespective of the interim fluctuations. Instead, as I told Congress, financial markets behaved more like a wrecking ball, swinging from country to country and knocking over the weaker ones. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the international financial system itself constituted the main ingredient in the meltdown process.

  George Soros

  Country, Swings, Balls

  "The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered". Book by George Soros, 1998.

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• The separation of families to me is very close to my heart because we lived that as immigrants. I strongly feel that we all connected, and having felt people's love and support first-hand through difficult moments in my life, makes me feel it's our responsibility to help one another. I am privileged to help in some way, and I will always take that opportunity.

  Gloria Estefan

  Heart, Responsibility, Opportunity

  The Associated Press, September 10, 2005.

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• I don't think that there's substantiated evidence that shows that voter fraud is such a rampant problem that we have to put in place measures that people have to pass in order to exercise that constitutional free right. Voting should be -- and is required to be -- a right that is unencumbered. That does not have tests that people must pass.... Anything put in place to restrict that right, or to make it more difficult for people to exercise it, should be outlawed, and should not be allowed.

  Clay Aiken

  Exercise, Thinking, Order

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• It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.

  Max Beckmann

  Depressing, Art, Luxury

  Max Beckmann, Barbara Copeland Buenger (1997). “Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950”, p.304, University of Chicago Press

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• You can raise good children in single parent households, and many of you perhaps here today come from that type of environment. It is possible and many do it in heroic situations, but it's much more difficult and the numbers move against us in a broad society.

  Sam Brownback

  Children, Moving, Numbers

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• One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

  James Russell Lowell

  Character, Break Through, Style

  James Russell Lowell (2015). “Abraham Lincoln”, p.22, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• It is restful to leave one's home; not because traveling does not entail varied and difficult daily actions, but because it removes our responsibilities.

  Andre Maurois

  Home, Responsibility, Doe

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• The reputation of a Don Juan gives to a man the most dangerous power. Wise virgins resist it, but foolish virgins frequently yield to the desire to take a celebrated lover from a rival - even from a friend. This emotion is a complex one, mad up of vanity, respect for another woman's taste, and the need to establish self-assurance by winning a difficult victory. Don Juan chose his first mistresses; later he was chosen.

  Andre Maurois

  Wise, Winning, Men

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.

  Andre Maurois

  Adventure, Soul, Age

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

  Marcel Proust

  People, Regimes, Oneself

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.419, Wordsworth Editions

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• I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.

  Mark Twain

  Russia, Europe, Turkeys

  Mark Twain (1869). “The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress”, p.443

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• It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.

  George Orwell

  Baby, Political, Natural

  George Orwell (1968). “The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell”

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• It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.

  Gertrude Stein

  Humor, Ideas, Being Funny

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Everybody's Autobiography”, p.150, Vintage

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• It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.

  Plutarch

  Tasks, Citizens, Ears

  Plutarch (2015). “Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans: Top Biography”, p.460, 谷月社

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• If you had told me 28 years ago that the largest organization in the world touching the lives of gays and lesbians would be a church, I would not have believed you. So many members of the lesbian and gay community feel they have had violence done to them by religious groups that it is very difficult to evangelize any members of our community. But we do evangelize.

  Troy Perry

  Religious, Gay, Years

  The Christian Century magazine, 1996.

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• There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Running, Real, Heart

  Sherwood Anderson (2016). “Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories”, p.14, Sherwood Anderson

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• What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  People, Understanding, Important

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Carl Klagge, Alfred Nordmann (1993). “Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951”, p.161, Hackett Publishing

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• Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change and difference is a relationship.

  Gregory Bateson

  Data, Differences, Events

  Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory Bateson (2006). “Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry”, p.173, Transaction Publishers

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• After initial needs are met—enough food, shelter, comfort—there is no correlation between money and happiness. That's a difficult thing for people to believe.

  Geneen Roth

  Money, Believe, People

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• It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

  Donald Barthelme

  Ideas, Demand, Next

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• There are very few things in the mind which eat up as much energy as worry. It is one of the most difficult things not to worry about anything. Worry is experienced when things go wrong, but in relation to past happenings it is idle merely to wish that they might have been otherwise. The frozen past is what it is, and no amount of worrying is going to make it other than what it has been. But the limited ego-mind identifies itself with its past, gets entangled with it and keeps alive the pangs of frustrated desires.

  Meher Baba

  Past, Worry, Ego

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• To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.

  Meher Baba

  Unions, Impossible, Oneself

  "The Everything and the Nothing". Book by Meher Baba, 1963.

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• It's really difficult to have your voice heard and feared when you both speak softly and carry a twig.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Voice, Speak, Twigs

  " Fareed Zakaria GPS", www.cnn.com. July 27, 2014.

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