Insufficient Quotes - Page 3

• America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  America, People, I Have A Dream Speech

  I Have a Dream, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

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• The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

  Dean Koontz

  Compassion, Empathy, Friendship Love

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• Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

  Conrad Black

  Real, War, Assault

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• And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

  Stephen Dunn

  Like Love, Lovely

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.

  Emile Durkheim

  Law, Moral, Unnecessary

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• At the present time there exist problems beyond our ability to solve, not because of theoretical difficulties, but because of insufficient means of mechanical computation.

  Howard Aiken

  Mean, Problem, Difficulty

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• Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

  Samuel Butler

  Life, Wisdom, Art

  Notebooks "Life" (1912)

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• When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

  Emile Durkheim

  Law, Unnecessary, Sufficient

  Attributed to Emile Durkheim in "Readings in Renewing American Civilization" edited by Jeffrey A. Eisenach and Albert Stephen Hanser (p. 54), 1993.

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• I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind, Am urged by your propinquity to find Your person fair, and feel a certain zest To bear your body's weight upon my breast; So subtly is the fume of life designed, To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind, And leave me once again undone, possessed. Think not for this, however, the poor treason Of my stout blood against my staggering brain, I shall remember you with love, or season My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain: I find this frenzy insufficient reason For conversation when we meet again.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Thinking, Clouds, Remember You

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (2003). “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems”, p.79, Library of America

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• Mew," the kitten retorted, locking gazes with him. It had the expression common to all kittens, that of a tyrant in the becoming. 'I was comfortable, and you dared to move,' those jade eyes said. 'For that you must die.' When it became apparent to the cat that its two or three pounds of mass were insufficient to break Locke's neck with one mighty snap, it put its paws on his shoulders and began sharing its drool-covered nose with his lips. He recoiled.

  Scott Lynch

  Moving, Cat, Eye

  Scott Lynch (2007). “Red Seas Under Red Skies”, p.387, Del Rey

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• You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

  Jane Austen

  Prejudice, Worthy, Please

  Jane Austen (1853). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.323

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• It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

  Jane Austen

  Time, Loneliness, Opportunity

  Sense and Sensibility vol. 2, ch. 12 (1811)

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• What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

  Sam Harris

  Inspirational, Motivational, Spiritual

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• The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Atheism, Belief

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• The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

  Steven Pinker

  Blow, Oxygen, Knives

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

  Iris Murdoch

  Lying, People, Feelings

  "Fictional character: Iris Murdoch". "Iris", www.imdb.com. 2001.

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• Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Our World, Self

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• As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie.

  Henry Miller

  Departed, Dawn, Alive

  "A Henry Miller reader".

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• You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Boys, Important, May

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• While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.

  Maimonides

  Mean, Men, Expression

  Moses Maimonides, Aeterna Press (1948). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.123, Aeterna Press

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• It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

  William James

  Believe, Philosophical, Government

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.9, 谷月社

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• Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

  Learned Hand

  Running, Past, Data

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.

  Samantha Power

  Rights, Presidential, Political

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• Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

  George Santayana

  Clouds, Air, Wind

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2013). “The The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two”, p.115, MIT Press

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• Virtue is insufficient temptation.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Temptation, Virtue

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