Docile Quotes - Page 3

Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.

Joanne Harris

Stupid, Sheep, May

Joanne Harris (2000). “Chocolat”, p.17, Penguin

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All day long he was docile, intelligent, good, Though sometimes changing to a darker mood. He seemed hypocritical, could tell better lies, in the dark he saw dots of colors behind closed eyes, clenched fists, put his tongue out at his elder brother.

Arthur Rimbaud

Brother, Lying, Eye

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When you drink fluoridated water, you're drinking liquid Prozac. You drink enough of it, even though it's a small amount, drink it for decades and decades and what does Prozac do to you? It dumbs you down; it makes you docile.

Jesse Ventura

Drinking, Water, Doe

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Young women from a very young age are taught that life will be easier if you can just turn on the charming smile and say very little and be complacent and docile and sweet.

Amber Heard

Sweet, Charming Smile, Age

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We have castrated society through fear and intimidation. Its manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easily ruled. As all geldings in nature, their thoughts are not involved with the concerns of the future and their posterity, but only with the present toil and the next meal.

Harold Wallace Rosenthal

Next, Toil, Meals

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And is it not true that in like manner a leader of the people who, getting control of a docile mob, does not withhold his hand from the shedding of tribal blood, but by the customary unjust accusations brings a citizen into court and assassinates him, blotting out a human life, and with unhallowed tongue and lips that have tasted kindred blood, banishes and slays and hints at the abolition of debts and the partition of lands.

Plato

Blood, Hands, Land

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And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.

Louis Aragon

Cities, Community, Loner

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To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Primo Levi

Men, Looks, Violence

Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.150, Simon and Schuster

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Techniques such as genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, 'safe' organisms.

William Sims

Engineering, Drug, Brain

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Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful.

Gore Vidal

Children, Pain, School

"The Last Empire" by Gore Vidal, www.nytimes.com. November 1998.

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We resist mindlessness of any kind. Again, drugs, like television, are fine for other people. The more enslaved they are, the easier it is for us, as long as they stay out of our way. Whether it’s through religiously-imposed ignorance, spectator sports, crack, pot, coke, heroin—or the consumer insecurities imposed by the almighty Tube—it’s fine with us as long as it keeps sheep more docile and easily contained. That doesn’t mean we have to subject ourselves to it. Military generals don’t step out on the missile range and volunteer as targets for the latest prototype weapons

Blanche Barton

Sports, Military, Ignorance

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Then ego goes on growing, because the society needs you as an ego, not as a Self. The Self is irrelevant for the society; your periphery is meaningful. And there are many problems. The ego can be taught and the ego can be made docile and the ego can be forced to be obedient. The ego can be made to adjust, but not the Self. The Self cannot be taught, the Self cannot be forced. The Self is intrinsically rebellious, individual. It cannot be made a part of society.

Rajneesh

Meaningful, Self, Ego

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My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

Vladimir Nabokov

Mirrors, Flying, Black

Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.414, Vintage

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There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

Ludwig von Mises

Nazi, Trotsky, Disciple

Ludwig Von Mises (1947). “Planned Chaos”, p.67, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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I love this book! Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom swirls with echoes of cartoon landscapes from the past and present. You can almost hear Percy Gloom's meek, docile little voice. Her writing is so full of wit and charm that we, like the title character, walk dutifully to the edge and fall in. And like Percy, we are rewarded equally with night terrors and secret treasures.

Jeff Smith

Book, Fall, Character

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I had that morning gone to say my farewells to Broadhurst and to the RAF. I had made a point of going to HQ at Schleswig in my 'Grand Charles.' Coming back I had taken him high up in the cloudless summer sky, for it was only there that I could fittingly take my leave. Together we climbed for the last time straight towards the sun. We looped once, perhaps twice, we lovingly did a few slow, meticulous rolls, so that I could take away in my finger-tips the vibration of his supple, docile wings.

Pierre Clostermann

Summer, Morning, Farewell

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This is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.

Herbert Read

Mean, Cutting, Practice

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The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The imageis in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.

John Crowe Ransom

Real, Character, Thinking

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And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Mary Oliver

Children, Want, Fields

Mary Oliver (1992). “New and Selected Poems”, Beacon Press (MA)

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Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

William Faulkner

Life, Wise, Brave

William Faulkner (1951). “Absalom, Absalom!”

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Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

John Taylor Gatto

Children, Giving Up, Government

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One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.

Gary Hamel

Strong, Effort, Scales

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It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.

Philippe Claudel

Writing, Air, Hands

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