Reluctance Quotes - Page 3

• I wish to preface my reflections by saying that I am conducting this prayer service and am speaking to you now with great reluctance. I did not seek to enter any controversy and I don't relish being part of one. But I have given this matter a great deal of thought and prayer, which has led me to the conviction that God is calling me to speak out and conduct these prayers.

  Thomas J. Paprocki

  Prayer, Reflection, Speaks Out

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• Our All is at Stake, and the little Conveniencys and Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.

  George Mason

  Competition, Liberty, Littles

  Letter to George Washington, April 5, 1769.

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• One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

  Frank Rich

  News, Century, Tics

  "What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us". www.nytimes.com. February 21, 2009.

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• I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

  Patricia Highsmith

  Character, Ordinary, Abnormal

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• With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President
  Obama ... is stepping once again - and with understandably great reluctance - into the chaos
  of an entire civilization that has broken down. Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but
  gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism -
  the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition-than at any time since the collapse of the
  Ottoman Empire a century ago.

  Hisham Melhem

  Islamic, Civilization, Broken

  "The Barbarians Within Our Gates" by Hisham Melhem, www.politico.com. September 18, 2014.

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• I have this certain reluctance when it comes to this idea that we are spiritual but not religious and we want Jesus but not the church. Why can't we have both?

  Shane Claiborne

  Spiritual, Religious, Jesus

  "Interview with Shane Claiborne: Embracing the Margins". Interview with Matt Dabbs, wineskins.org. November 17, 2015.

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• The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only 'with the greatest reluctance’.

  Raymond P. Shafer

  Law, Drug, Criminals

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• The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.

  R. H. Tawney

  Quality, Vices, Principles

  'The Acquisitive Society' (1921)

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• It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.

  Stefan Zweig

  Girl, Women, Lying

  Stefan Zweig (2009). “Selected Stories”, p.69, Pushkin Press

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• We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Moral, Seems, Values

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• If you're a songwriter, it's to perform your songs. For singers, it's just to get to sing somewhere. So while there may be a reluctance with all the things that go along with it, you got to choose, and this is one of my big opportunities to get back doing it.

  Donnie Fritts

  Song, Opportunity, May

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I was busy with my family, my budding career as a TV writer, my antipathy for the Los Angeles Lakers, and my general reluctance to engage in anything that might force me to leave my comfort zone. But sometimes ideas won't let you go. For me, educating girls was like that.

  Richard E. Robbins

  Girl, Careers, Ideas

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• People - whether you like to hear what people have got to say, not you have got to listen to them, and turning your back on people I found very insulting. If you're going to really make peace, you have got to confront each other and look each other in the eye, and that's what's happen - I'm always remember Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat and the reluctance in - Yasser Arafat put his hand down and the reluctance of Yitzhak Rabin, but then he had that second and then he just shook the hand.

  Warren Mundine

  Eye, Hands, People

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• I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

  Ellen Goodman

  Religious, Moving, Acceptance

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• Receive the gifts of fortune without pride, and part with them without reluctance.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Pride, Fortune

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome), Thomas Gataker (1749). “The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus”, p.307

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• There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  People, Balance, Inability

  "In Memoriam: F.A. Hayek" by Virginia Postrel, reason.com. June 1992.

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• Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

  Susan Sontag

  Character, Tests, Moral

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction

  Georg Brandes

  Humility, Self, Names

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.17, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• We must take the best from the left and the best from the right to devise new strategies for the global twenty-first century. The reluctance of liberal professors to speak out against rampant abuses committed on their side (e.g., suppression of free speech, the excesses of women's studies and French theory) has simply increased the power of the right.

  Camille Paglia

  Speaks Out, Abuse, Twenties

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.18, Vintage

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• In one way, I'm sympathetic to the institutional reluctance to face the music. I'd give a lot to mark my weight to 'model' rather than to 'market.'

  Warren Buffett

  Giving, Weight, Way

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• The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.

  Peter Lynch

  Office, Extravagance, Rewards

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• It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Animal, Long, Mind

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats (1829). “The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: Complete in One Volume”

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• Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

  Alan Brennert

  Divorce, Ties, People

  Alan Brennert (2010). “Moloka'i: A Novel”, p.382, St. Martin's Press

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• Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements . . . are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and slow gradations.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Education, Men, Practice

  Alexander Hamilton, Donald R. Hickey, Connie D. Clark (2006). “Citizen Hamilton: The Wit and Wisdom of an American Founder”, p.73, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.

  Frank Herbert

  Affair, Increase, Should

  Frank Herbert (1986). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, Berkley Trade

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