Limitation Quotes - Page 17

• The limitations imposed by democratic political practices makes it difficult to conduct our foreign affairs in the national interest.

  Dean Acheson

  Practice, Political, Affair

  Dean Acheson (1967). “Private thoughts on public affairs: a citizen looks at Congress, and a Democrat looks at his party”

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• One of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we've internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.

  Barack Obama

  Community, Legacy, World

  "Lou Dobbs Tonight" with Lou Dobbs, www.cnn.com. July 16, 2009.

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• As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize that, whether they like it or not, they are simply going to have to put up with what to them are excruciatingly slow mental processes, that we humans have embarrassingly low I.Q.'s, and that probably because of these defects, we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplist and most explicit of directions.

  Cleveland Amory

  Cat, Mind, Inability

  Cleveland Amory (2002). “The cat who came for Christmas ; The cat and the curmudgeon ; The best cat ever”

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• People who are not leaders automatically gravitate toward lines--limitations set by others. Many people are taught this in kindergarten when they are instructed to stay within the lines while coloring. But leaders are more creative than that. They look for options and opportunities. They try to take things in a new direction, or beyond the limit. Progress and innovation are made by people who think without lines.

  John C. Maxwell

  Leadership, Opportunity, Thinking

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• We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think - only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.

  Alan Watts

  Eye, Heart, Thinking

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts, (p. 112), 1966.

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• Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

  Camille Paglia

  Fate, Political, Feminism

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.28, Canongate Books

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• The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

  Novalis

  Spiritual, Mean, Past

  "Blüthenstaub". Book by Novalis, 1798.

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• Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Magic, Shadow

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.12, Grove Press

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• Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the "faithless faith" in the reality whose victims they are.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Block, Reality, Thinking

  Herbert Marcuse (1964). “One dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society”

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• Our Lord Jesus Christ, a little before his departure, commissioned his apostles to Go, and teach all nations; or, as another evangelist expresses it, Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. This commission was as extensive as possible, and laid them under obligation to disperse themselves into every country of the habitable globe, and preach to all the inhabitants, without exception, or limitation. They accordingly went forth in obedience to the command, and the power of God evidently wrought with them.

  William Carey

  Country, Jesus, Departure

  William Carey (1792). “An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens: In which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings are Considered,”, p.7

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• I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Appreciation, Book, Writing

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• There is a limitation on debate, which is unlike other bills, for 20 hours, but there is no limitation on amendments. In other words, Republicans if they wanted to, and I suspect they do, could offer literally thousands of amendments and keep Senate in session for weeks and months.

  Rick Santorum

  Bills, Months, Republican

  "Santorum's Health Care Stall Tactic: 'Offer Literally Thousands of Amendments' to Keep Senate in Session for Months". www.mediamatters.org. February 27, 2010.

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• Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.

  Anthony Daniels

  Ideas, Triumph, Fantasy

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• A man must know his limitations.

  David Gemmell

  Men, Knows

  David Gemmell (2011). “Legend”, p.75, Hachette UK

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• Review your goals twice every day in order to be focused on achieving them. “Focus on your potential instead of your limitations.

  Alan Loy McGinnis

  Order, Goal, Focus

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• I'm excited by the band [White Stripes]. It really excites me. But it wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped. Once that goes away, then I'll know that it's not worth doing it any more.

  Jack White

  White, Stripes, Band

  "What's Eating Jack?". Interview with Andrew Perry, www.theguardian.com. November 14, 2004.

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• The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man - the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more - is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Men, Reality, Ideas

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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• Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Numbers, Doctors, Anxiety

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• It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Book, Hard Work, Writing

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• Obama was willing to compromise and Republicans were not. That's not a biased statement. One of my problems with the limitations of journalism is that straightforward descriptions of reality are seen as being biased.

  Jonathan Alter

  Reality, Journalism, Compromise

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• Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.

  Ellen Willis

  People, Social Behavior, Human Nature

  Letter to "The New York Times", February 27, 1997.

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• Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

  Nick Bostrom

  Data Collection, Inference, Process

  Director of the Future of Humanity Institute Nick Bostrom, Nick Bostrom (2013). “Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy”, p.1, Routledge

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• It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Responsibility, Owing

  Rudolf Steiner (2011). “The Philosophy of Freedom: The Basis for a Modern World Conception”, p.74, Rudolf Steiner Press

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• The fact that previous generations have handed down to us a substantial public heritage by way of roads, port, etc. almost completely free of debt, seems to me to impose some limitation on the validity of the theory that by borrowing we should, or could, pass on the burden of development to the next generation.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Way, Next, Etc

  "Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council", (p. 131), March 30, 1962.

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• Money cannot be converted into houses or trained teachers or hospitals at the touch of a magic wand. There are limitations to our physical and intellectual resources.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Teacher, House, Intellectual

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 51), February 26, 1964.

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