Dubious Quotes - Page 5

• But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Pain, Years, Essence

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• I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.

  Philip Kitcher

  Ideas, Finals, Ethical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Central banks have gotten out of the central banking business and into the central planning business, meaning that they are devoted to raising up-if they can-economic growth and employment through the dubious means of suppressing interest rates and printing money. The nice thing about gold is that you can't print it.

  James Grant

  Money, Nice, Mean

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• When something tragic has happened, you'll find that you, the tragicee, become the person that has to make everything comfortable for everyone else.... As a tragicee and future divorcee, you'll also find that people will question you on the biggest decisions you've ever made in your life as though you hadn't thought about them at all before – as though, through their twenty questions and dubious faces, they're going to shine light on something that you missed the hundredth time around during your darkest hours.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Divorce, Light, People

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• So, Beav, tell me about yourself." "I'm Blue." "Sweetheart, if I had your dubious taste in men, I wouldn't be too happy, either." "My name is Blue. Blue Bailey.

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Men, Blue, Names

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips (2009). “Natural Born Charmer”, p.22, Harper Collins

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• Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Wisdom, Ideas, Profound

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• Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

  John Walford

  Beauty, Artist, Belief

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• [On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.

  Sally Stanford

  Sex, Entering, Advantage

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• The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.

  Sheldon Richman

  Pain, Organization, Political

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• Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

  Jerry Fodor

  Mean, Differences, Views

  "Modularity of Mind". Book by Jerry Fodor, 1983.

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• There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.

  Hannah

  Should Have, Political, Honor

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• Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.

  Jose Saramago

  Prayer, Mysterious Things, Heaven

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• The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.

  Scott Ritter

  Motivation, Media, Iraq

  The Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2002.

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• It would have been easier to fight alone with inadequate forces than to have to accept...responsibility for our ally's lack of fighting qualities and dubious loyalty.

  Albert Kesselring

  Loyalty, War, Responsibility

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• It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction.

  Valerie Solanas

  Males, Female, Purpose

  Valerie Solanas (1971). “SCUM Manifesto”, p.35, Verso

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• If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel ... In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.

  Michael Pollan

  Dirty, School, Dark

  Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.222, Penguin

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• The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.

  Aberjhani

  Prayer, Light, Gestation Period

  Aberjhani (2014). “Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry”, p.28, Lulu.com

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• I am dubious as to how far we can move toward global community-which is the only way to achieve international peace-until we learn the basic principles of community in our own individual lives and personal spheres of influence.

  M. Scott Peck

  Moving, Community, Principles

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• The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle...

  H. L. Mencken

  Honesty, Men, Law

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• Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.

  E. B. White

  Weather, Tasks, Alive

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• The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

  Wallace Stegner

  Life, Errors, Trial And Error

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1995). “Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: living and writing in the West”, Random House Value Pub

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• It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity.

  Hubert Harrison

  Blessing, Class, Would Be

  Hubert Harrison, Jeffrey B. Perry (2001). “A Hubert Harrison Reader”, p.43, Wesleyan University Press

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• In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

  Julian Barnes

  Sometimes, Influence, Britain

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Jesse [James] was known as a kind of Robin Hood character and also it was known that his exploits were somewhat dubious - however, he perpetuated this myth. Our film [The Assassination of Jesse James] really takes place at the end of all that, the last year of his life, at the end of all that celebrity.

  Brad Pitt

  Character, Years, Robins

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Most Americans acquire dogs impulsively and for dubious reasons: as a Christmas gift for the kids. Because they saw one in a movie. To match the new living-room furniture. Because they moved to the suburbs and see a dog as part of the package.

  Jon Katz

  Dog, Kids, Rooms

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