Effort Quotes - Page 30

• Plans are easy to make, dreams are easy to dream. But putting your back into it? A little bit of hard graft and discipline? That is just too scary and far too much effort for the masses

  Chris Murray

  Dream, Discipline, Scary

  7 Copy quote

• The more complex our security becomes, the more complex our enemy's efforts must be.The more we seek to shut him out, the better he must learn to become at breaking in.Each new level of security that we manage becomes no more than a stepping-stone for him who would surpass us, for he bases his next assault upon our best defenses.It is a ware that can never truly be won… but one we dare not lose.

  C.S. Friedman

  Enemy, Defense, Levels

  C.S. Friedman (1999). “This Alien Shore”, p.32, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Islamist-jihadist terrorism-a plague that has spread to almost every corner of the world-creates painful dilemmas for the peoples and decision makers who confront it. Its rapid, shape-shifting advance has sometimes confounded efforts to comprehend its origins, motives, and aims. Its sophistication in exploiting liberal values poses challenges and difficulties for the Western world, and for liberal democratic states in general, in attaining effective and balanced counter-terrorism policies.

  Boaz Ganor

  Decision, Challenges, World

  6 Copy quote

• The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

  Walter Lippmann

  Loss, Civilization, Class

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

  Cesare Pavese

  Writing, Pages, Unsaid

  Cesare Pavese (1961). “The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950”, New York : Walker

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

  Cesare Pavese

  Past, Skills, Technique

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.318, Transaction Publishers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

  Mortimer Adler

  Reading, Able, Range

  "How to Read a Book". Book by Mortimer Adler, 1940.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Attitude, Greatness, Odds

  "The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man" by Marshall McLuhan, (p. 21), 1951.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Intellectual, World, Artistic

  Commonweal, Volume 58 (p. 557), 1953.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whenever you're going after something that belongs to you, anyone who's depriving you of the right to have it is a criminal. Understand that. Whenever you are going after something that is yours, you are within your legal rights to lay claim to it. And anyone who puts forth any effort to deprive you of that which is yours, is breaking the law, is a criminal.

  Malcolm X

  Law, Rights, Criminals

  "The Ballot or The Bullet (Cleveland Version)". Malcolm X's speech at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964) as quoted in "Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements" edited by George Breitman (pp. 23-44), 1965.

  57 Copy quote

  Show source

• The problem facing our people here in America is bigger than all other personal or organizational differences. Therefore, as leaders, we must stop worrying about the threat that we seem to think we pose to each other's personal prestige, and concentrate our united efforts toward solving the unending hurt that is being done daily to our people here in America.

  Malcolm X

  Hurt, Thinking, Differences

  "Malcolm X Speaks". Book by George Breitman, p. 21, 1965.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some women are convinced that they are the same size they were 20 years ago. They also wear clothes that are too big in an effort to hide their body. Both cases are unflattering and work against your body. Some women are in denial about changing.

  Stacy London

  Years, Clothes, Denial

  4 Copy quote

• I think that it is a fallacy to suppose that helpful cooperation in the future will be assured by the attempted compulsion of an inflexible rule. Rather will such cooperation depend upon the fostering of firm friendships springing from an appreciation of community ideals, interests, and purposes, and such friendships are more likely to be promoted by freedom of conference than by the effort to create hard and fast engagements.

  Charles Evans Hughes

  Appreciation, Thinking, Community

  "Autobiographical Notes of Charles Hughes". Book edited by D. J. Danelski and J. S. Tulchin, 1973.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses.

  Charles Evans Hughes

  Selfish, Opportunity, Government

  Charles Evans Hughes (1910). “Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government”

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ways of Providence being inscrutable, and the justice of it not to be scanned by the shallow eye of humanity, nor to be counteracted by the utmost efforts of human power or wisdom, resignation, and as far as the strength of our reason and religion can carry us, a cheerful acquiescence to the Divine Will, is what we are to aim.

  George Washington

  Eye, Justice, Humanity

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1944). “The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799: prepared under the direction of the United States George Washington bicentennial commission and published by authority of Congress”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.

  George Washington

  Destiny, Our Actions, Human Nature

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson (1769). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”, p.288

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Art, Memories, Air

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Windmills, Slopes

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.171, 1982.

  138 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Stories, Littles, Reader

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

  Iris Murdoch

  Soul, Desire, Mathematics

  Iris Murdoch (1994). “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals”, p.159, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't know who the great lawyers are, and I presume you can't get to them. I know of no case where it can be said for certain that they took part. They defend some people, but you can't get them to do that through your own efforts, they only defend the ones they want to defend. But I assume a case they take on must have progressed beyond the lower court. It's better not to think of them at all, otherwise you'll find the consultations with the other lawyers, their advice and their assistance, extremely disgusting and useless.

  Franz Kafka

  Thinking, People, Advice

  4 Copy quote

• Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.

  Robertson Davies

  Laughter, Wall, Voice

  "Lew Fields". 1941.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Effort supposes resistance.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Resistance

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser (1998). “The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings”, p.369, Indiana University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

  Jane Addams

  Pride, Self, Age

  Jane Addams, Charlene Haddock Seigfried (2002). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.6, University of Illinois Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!

  Jane Addams

  Mother, Children, Stupid

  Jane Addams (2016). “Twenty Years at Hull House”, p.109, Open Road Media

  11 Copy quote

  Show source