Obvious Quotes - Page 26

• Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

  Ezekiel Emanuel

  Example, Citizens, Becoming

  "Palin target renounces care rationing" by Jon Ward, www.washingtontimes.com. August 14, 2009.

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• To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.

  Criss Jami

  Believe, Mean, Reality

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.16, Criss Jami

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• To lend money without interest, is certainly an action laudable and extremely good; but it is obvious, that it is only a counsel of religion, and not a civil law.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Law, Action, Lending

  Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, baron de, Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu (2005). “The Spirit of Laws”, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Missing, Cases, Symbols

  Wilfrid Sheed (1978). “The good word and other words”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.

  Winston Churchill

  Ocean, Army, Air

  "War Situation". Speech in the House of Commons, api.parliament.uk. August 2, 1944.

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• The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

  Paul Valery

  Mean, Men, Expression

  "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 42), 1931.

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• The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

  James Toback

  Mistake, Ideas, Needs

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. April 30, 2009.

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• That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

  Blaise Pascal

  Greatness, Vanity, People

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• I want to keep working with people that care about what they're doing. It seems obvious, but it's not. It's sometimes hard to keep on that track.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  People, Track, Care

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. March 28, 2007.

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• I try not to go the obvious route all the time, but sometimes the most obvious is actually the best.

  Al Yankovic

  Trying, Sometimes, Routes

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• I don't ever want to do anything that's obvious, and I also want to find ways to do things that are extremely new and exciting and can make sense in bizarre ways. I always want things to make sense in really bizarre ways.

  Jack Antonoff

  Want, Way, Bizarre

  Source: collider.com

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• When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

  Idries Shah

  Prayer, Mean, Emotional

  Idries Shah (1991). “Seeker After Truth”, p.22, Octagon Press Ltd

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• It became obvious in 1957 that I was endangering my health by carrying so much weight.

  Kate Smith

  Weight

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• Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Life, Lying, Waiting

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter VI : The Paradoxes of Christianity, 1908.

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• No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mixtures, Facts, Defining

  "The Lying Stones of Marrakech". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 281, 2001.

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• Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Data, Rocks, Intellectual

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin”, p.280, Random House

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• God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

  Quentin Crisp

  Age, Ambassadors, Territory

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 16, 1968.

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• The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.

  Simone Weil

  Men, Order, Essence

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.168, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

  Thomas Friedman

  Thinking, Government, Years

  "The Earth Is Full". www.nytimes.com. June 7, 2011.

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• Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

  Claude Debussy

  Writing, Light, Variation

  Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Roger Nichols (1987). “Debussy Letters: ,”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

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• A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.

  Tahir Shah

  Pain, Secret, Passionate

  Tahir Shah (2013). “Sorcerer's Apprentice paperback”, p.92, Lulu.com

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• Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

  Tahir Shah

  Book, Impact, Blood

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• I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?

  Eugene Ionesco

  Mean, Theatre, Doe

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• Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence.

  David Sedaris

  Running, Zoos, Stupid

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

  Chinua Achebe

  Real, Years, Challenges

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.50, Penguin

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