Inverted Quotes

• I don't know how you were diverted You were perverted too. I don't know how you were inverted No one alerted you.

  George Harrison

  Know How, Knows

  Song: While My Guitar Gently Weeps Acoustic Version

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• The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It's weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.

  Danny Boyle

  Opening Ceremony, Games, Important

  "127 Hours - Danny Boyle interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Years ago R.N.A. was kind of a bit player in the cell. Now our picture's completely inverted, and we think R.N.A.'s really the important thing.

  Jack W. Szostak

  Player, Thinking, Cells

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

  Hannah More

  Prayer, Book, Reading

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• Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top - the aristocracy of non-value.

  Ayn Rand

  Equality, Men, Law

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.119, Penguin

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• Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

  Emile Zola

  Fall, Men, Nurse

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• He credited her with a number of virtues, of the existence of which her conduct and conversation had given but limited indications. -But, then, lovers have a proverbial power of balancing inverted pyramids, going to sea in sieves, and successfully performing other kindred feats impossible to a faithless and unbelieving generation.

  Lucas Malet

  Sea, Pyramids, Numbers

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• So we can see we must substitute faith for fear, for fear is only inverted faith; it is faith in evil instead of good.

  Florence Scovel Shinn

  Evil, Substitutes

  "Women's Wisdom: The New Thought Movement".

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• First Corinthians so clearly says that whether we eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God. It's not just self. Jesus said ... in Matthew 16, 'Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me.' The Osteens have just inverted that. They think it's not the denial of self, but the exaltation of self. They're not trying to pursue a cross; they're trying to pursue prosperity. And they're certainly not following the biblical Jesus. They're following whatever brings happiness and contentment.

  Steve Camp

  Jesus, Biblical, Thinking

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• There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

  Raymond Chandler

  Honesty, Writing, Men

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.93, Univ of California Press

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• And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Quotation Marks, Upside Down, Ends

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• Political Correctness is inverted McCarthyism.

  Dennis Miller

  Political, Politics, Mccarthyism

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• We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Thinking, Guarantees, May

  Clifton Fadiman (1957). “Any Number Can Play”, Cleveland : World Publishing Company

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• It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.

  Louis Sullivan

  Dream, Past, Self

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• We have reached a stage where governments and political processes have been hijacked by the corporate world. Corporations can within five hours influence the vote in the U.S. Congress. They can influence the entire voting patterns of the Indian Parliament. Ordinary people who put governments in power might want to go in a different direction. I call this the phenomenon of the inverted state, where the state is no longer accountable to the people. The state only serves the interests of corporations.

  Vandana Shiva

  Government, People, Political

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Worry, Political, Democracy

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Wonder of wonders! Intrinsically all living beings are Buddhas, endowed with wisdom and virtue, but because men's minds have become inverted through delusive thinking they fail to perceive this.

  Gautama Buddha

  Men, Thinking, Mind

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• Recognition is powerful, as long as it's authentic and specific. Whatever their level on the inverted pyramid, employees wants to feel needed and valued.

  Robert Spector

  Powerful, Pyramids, Long

  Robert Spector, Patrick D. McCarthy (2012). “The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence: The Handbook For Becoming the "Nordstrom" of Your Industry”, p.47, John Wiley & Sons

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• Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

  E. M. Forster

  Dog, Character, Light

  'Aspects of the Novel' (1927) ch. 6 (on James Joyce's 'Ulysses')

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• Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Philosophical, Writing, Thoughtful

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• The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

  E. M. Forster

  Sex, Character, Names

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• You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Stupid, Pride, Proud

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Distance, Native American, White

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• Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

  Chris Hedges

  Expression, Leader, Democracy

  Chris Hedges (2010). “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”, p.146, Nation Books

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• Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.

  Chalmers Johnson

  Party, Elements, Empires

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