Dispassionate Quotes

• Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

  Abraham Maslow

  Truth, Real, Passion

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• My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

  Simon Newcomb

  Boyfriend, Dad, Father

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

  James Buchan

  Generations, World, Succeed

  "Judgment Day... again". www.theguardian.com. August 6, 2001.

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• If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

  James Buchan

  Passion, History, Waiting

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• There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

  William Ernest Henley

  Character, Men, Two

  William Ernest Henley (1906). “Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Literature”

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• Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.

  Eric Hoffer

  Attitude, Self, World

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.

  Walter E. Williams

  Hurt, Heart, Men

  Walter E. Williams (2013). “Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays”, p.257, Hoover Press

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• What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

  David Rakoff

  Memories, Past, Zoom

  FaceBook post by David Rakoff from Mar 05, 2017

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• The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Character, Rocks

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”, p.468

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• The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.

  Irving Howe

  Intellectual, Independence, Mind

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• This does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head.

  Larry Wall

  Mean, Doe, Want

  Usenet article, 1992.

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• But I say these things in an objective dispassionate manner because, you know, and I can't explain why, but being one of the greatest guitarists in the world simply is not very important to me.

  John Fahey

  Guitar, Important, World

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• As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

  Natasha Kaplinsky

  Jobs, Insecure, Stories

  "Kaplinsky's tears over family secret". Interview in Metro, August 28, 2007.

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• [My] pillar of support through life.... I can say conscientiously that I do not know in the world a man of purer integrity, more dispassionate, disinterested, and devoted to genuine Republicanism; nor could I in the whole scope of America and Europe point out an abler head.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Integrity, Men, Europe

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• A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

  Sylvia Plath

  Knives, Sky, White

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.52, Hamilton Books

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• There is in some men a dispassionate neutrality of mind, which, though it generally passes for good temper, can neither gratify nor warm us: it must indeed be granted that these men can only negatively offend: but then it should also be remembered that they cannot positively please.

  Sir Fulke Greville

  Men, Mind, Neutrality

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• America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Inspirational Life, Healing, America

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• Everybody is looking with his own world of desires, expectations, passions, lust, greed, anger. There are a thousand and one things standing between you and your world; that's why you don't ever see it as it is. Once your eye is completely clean, clean of all the dust, once it becomes a pure mirror, it reflects that which is. And that is truth and truth liberates, but it has to be your own. My truth cannot liberate you, Buddha's truth cannot liberate you. There is only one possibility of liberation, that is your own truth. And all that you have to do is to create a dispassionate eye.

  Rajneesh

  Eye, Passion, Mirrors

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• Writing is self-taught. Consulting other people only teaches you to depend on their reactions, which may or may not be legitimate. Quit looking for approval ... Learn to evaluate your own work with a dispassionate eye ... the lessons you acquire will be all the more valuable because you've mastered your craft from within.

  Sue Grafton

  Writing, Eye, Self

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• Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

  Richard Dawkins

  Art, Use, Way

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.

  John Stossel

  Jobs, Government, Giving

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• Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations - and seen them die, and seen new ones born again - Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

  Beryl Markham

  Men, Race, Land

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• I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.

  Brian Eno

  People, Flying, Wish

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.

  James Van Allen

  Motivation, Adventure, Commitment

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• Science remains the author of our major problem, in its gift of tremendous power that has been terribly abused; but for the wise use of this power we need more, not less, of the objective dispassionate scientific spirit. For our philosophical purposes we need more of its integrity and its basic humility, its respect at once for the fact and the mystery.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Wise, Integrity, Philosophical

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