Parrots Quotes - Page 5

• What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Believe, Humility

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• Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.

  Giordano Bruno

  Moving, Mean, Circles

  "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds". Book by Giordano Bruno, 1584.

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• The papers are portraying Rafa as a parrot, just like they did when they showed Graham Taylor as an onion

  Bobby Gould

  Onions, Paper, Portraying

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• And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

  Sylvia Plath

  Suicide, Past, Thinking

  "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath".

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• We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

  Marge Piercy

  Sex, School, Dumb

  Marge Piercy (2011). “Dance the Eagle to Sleep”, p.73, PM Press

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• To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad... I think I see one or two quick blows that will astonish the natives of the South and will convince them that, though to stand behind a big cottonwood and shoot at a passing boat is good sport and safe, it may still reach and kill their friends and families hundreds of miles off. For every bullet shot at a steamboat, I would shoot a thousand 30-pounder Parrots into even helpless towns on Red, Ouachita, Yazoo, or wherever a boat can float or soldier march.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Sports, Thinking, Blow

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• I'm not fighting with myself. Oh, my God. That's how I am. You know, the story of the hippo? The hippo comes to the monkey and said, listen, I'm not a hippo. So, he paint himself like a zebra. He said but he's still a hippo. He said but look at you, you're painted like a zebra but you are a hippo. So then he goes, you know, like I want be a little parrot. So, he put the colours on him and he comes to the monkey and said but, sorry, you are a hippo. So, in the end, you know, he comes and said I'm happy to be a hippo. This is who I am. So, I have to be who I am and he's happy being a hippo.

  Marat Safin

  Zebras, Sorry, Fighting

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• I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Feels, Comfortable

  "Sandra Cisneros writes fable for grieving grown-ups". Interview with Cindy Y. Rodriguez, www.cnn.com. October 23, 2012.

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• A respect for authority is the basis for most medical education. Students may become so used to memorising that they become prey to the illusion that the reason for learning to parrot lectures and textbooks is that they are the 'truth'.

  Petr Skrabanek

  Truth, Textbooks, May

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• You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Law, Firsts, Spirit

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• I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology. ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching.

  Thomas Huxley

  Education, Teacher, Children

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1882). “Science and Culture: And Other Essays”

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• In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Men, Degenerates

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.175

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• Words learn'd by rote a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse, Not more distinct from harmony divine The constant creaking of a country sign.

  William Cowper

  Country, Talking, May

  William Cowper, Henry Stebbing (1869). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, Esq: Including the Hymns and Translations from Madame Guion, Milton, Etc. ; with a Memoir of the Author”, p.128

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• I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.

  Raymond Chandler

  Years, Common Sense, Fifty

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• TOPER. Yesterday I carried to wait on a Relation of ours that has a Parrot, and whilst I was discoursing about some private Business, she converted the Bird, and now it talks of nothing but the Light of the Spirit, and the Inward man.

  Susanna Centlivre

  Women, Light, Yesterday

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• Seriously, many people have told me they can't eat turkeys anymore after getting to know them. I think in the wider world, when the stories air on the media, they help banish the idea that birds, other than parrots, are somehow lesser.

  Karen Dawn

  Thinking, Air, Media

  "Animal Advocate and Author Karen Dawn: The Welfare of Animals and the Earth". Interview with Barbi Twins, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The middle way is still driving on the wrong side of the road; it still permits the killing of the fox for pleasure. One cannot kill half a fox. Like Monty Python parrot, a fox torn apart by hounds remains dead, deceased and off its perch for ever. Before the fox has been dispatched - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - it will have suffered the agonies of the pursuit by animals four times its size and four times its strength. The middle way is a compromise that still seriously compromises the welfare of the fox.

  Lyndon Harrison, Baron Harrison

  Hunting, Animal, Python

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• It is possible, of course, to operate with figures mechanically, just as it is possible to speak like a parrot: but that hardly deserves the names of thought. It only becomes possible at all after the mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak.

  Gottlob Frege

  Knowledge, Thinking, Names

  Gottlob Frege, J. L. Austin (1980). “The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry Into the Concept of Number”, p.4, Northwestern University Press

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• My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important.Now it glows parrot-green, cool as mint, soft as moss, lying there like a cashmere blanket.

  W. P. Kinsella

  Lying, Intuition, Important

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• It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

  Jerome Bruner

  Children, Teaching, Adults

  Jerome Seymour Bruner (1979). “On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand”, p.117, Harvard University Press

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• Every unwanted animal ends up on my farm: alpacas and horses and dogs and cats and chickens and ducks and parrots and fish and guinea pigs.

  Salma Hayek

  Dog, Horse, Cat

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• Shirley and Griffey get along like a rattler and a parrot.

  Jerry Coleman

  Funny, Baseball, Humor

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• You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Fall, Fighting, Thinking

  P. G. Wodehouse (2015). “Right Ho, Jeeves”, p.148, Booklassic

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• In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book.

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Book, Spirit, Proust

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• Most of the time, I get auditions for deaf characters where the scene has them communicating in really convoluted ways, like reading lips from across the room when the other persons back is turned or having other people parrot what they say.

  Shoshannah Stern

  Reading, Character, People

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