Respectable Quotes - Page 12

• Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Renan's verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage.

  Julien Benda

  Attitude, Men, Greek

  "Treason of the Intellectuals". Book by Julien Benda, pp. 151-152, 1927.

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• Scientific evidence for God's existence is being claimed today by theists, many of whom carry respectable scientific or philosophical credentials. He who is neither a she nor an it supposedly answers prayers and otherwise dramatically affects the outcome of events. If these consequences are as significant as believers say, then the effects should be detectable in properly controlled experiments.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Prayer, Philosophical, Religion

  Victor J. Stenger (2003). “Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe”, Pyr Books

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• Novell has the necessary resources to be a much more profitable enterprise but it currently lacks the vision, strategy and execution to produce respectable returns.

  Maynard James Keenan

  Vision, Return, Execution

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• I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

  Bertrand Russell

  Good Morning, People, Looks

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• Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Struggle, Class, Our World

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

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• They often say woman cannot keep a secret, but every woman in the world, like every man, has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she hides from even herself. The more respectable she is, the more certain it is the secrets exist.

  Austin O'Malley

  Women, Soul, Secret

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• The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

  Robert Bork

  Religious, Believe, Views

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• As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

  Henry Adams

  Class, America, Boredom

  Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams”, p.200, Harvard University Press

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• People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy.

  Democritus

  Children, Hypocrisy, People

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• I had the most reversed education possible. Every parent wants their son to be a businessman, respectable - me, it was the opposite. When I had an artist career my mum was like, 'Oh finally, I'm proud of you!

  David Guetta

  Son, Artist, Opposites

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• If you believe in living a respectable life, you believe in self-help which is the best help!

  B. R. Ambedkar

  Believe, Self, Helping

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• One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

  Diane Wakoski

  Book, Numbers, Long

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• Let us hold fast the great truth, that communities are responsible, as well as individuals; that no government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society.

  Daniel Webster

  Government, Law, Giving

  Daniel Webster, Edwin Percy Whipple (2001). “The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster”, p.150, Beard Books

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• One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.

  Gilbert F. White

  Wise, Mean, Government

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• Command that your marshal be careful to be present over the household, and especially in the hall, to keep the household, within doors and without, respectable, without dispute or noise, or bad words.

  Robert Grosseteste

  Doors, Noise, Disputes

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• Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can't hate black people anymore, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.

  Tom Clancy

  Hate, People, Catholic

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• One of the interesting things about "outsidership" is that underneath it there's a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to - the species, Western capital culture - was a little more respectable. My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

  George Carlin

  Interesting, Relaxation, Wish

  Interview with Ricky Young, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Family, Faith, Daughter

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.43, 谷月社

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• I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

  Callan McAuliffe

  Dialect, Accents

  Source: collider.com

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• A wise man should marry a virgin of a respectable family even if she is deformed. He should not marry one of a low-class family, through beauty. Marriage in a family of equal status is preferable.

  Chanakya

  Wise, Men, Class

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• Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Interesting, Farming, Poor

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.121, Graphic Arts Books

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• An honest, sensible, humane man, . . . laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity . . . is really the most respectable man in society, [and] makes himself and all about him most happy.

  John Adams

  Money, Men, Simplicity

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• I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

  Cormac McCarthy

  House, Citizens, Felt

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• Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.

  William Ellery Channing

  Life, Fun, Grateful

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