Ruthless Quotes - Page 10

• I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.

  Jane Jacobs

  Book, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.metropolismag.com

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• I never bring a role home with me. The moment they say, 'It's a wrap,' it's gone completely. I'm a totally ruthless professional, and life is my family, not my work.

  Michael Caine

  Home, Roles, Gone

  "This much I know". Interview with John Hind, www.theguardian.com. September 12, 2009.

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• [William] Klein has eyes like a knife. He is ruthless and outrageous but never mean - he is tender and funny and violent - and, I'm sure, really in love with our crazy Rome.

  Sophia Loren

  Crazy, Mean, Eye

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• Richelieu was a great statesman, and like all great statesman, he was a very ruthless man. He's not cruel. He just does what he has to do. And in his own mind, he's absolutely right.

  Adrian Hodges

  Men, Mind, Doe

  Source: collider.com

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• I paint with a language I can call my own... it takes a ruthless honesty with oneself. If one admires or is influenced by anyone else, one is not being true to oneself.

  Scott Kahn

  Honesty, Language, Paint

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• If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Ambition, People, Time On Earth

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• We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

  Jack Gilbert

  Acceptance, World, Ruthlessness

  Jack Gilbert (2009). “Refusing Heaven”, p.3, Knopf

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• [M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

  C. S. Lewis

  Strong, Philosophy, Thinking

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• A community where everyone is a ruthless murderer, with handy access to death-dealing devices, is a very polite community.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Community, Polite, Murderer

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• The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me.

  Armand Hammer

  Art, Fighting, Relaxation

  1987 Hammer, Witness to History, his autobiography.

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• Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

  Cyril Connolly

  Appreciation, Hands, People

  Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

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• The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

  Peter Singer

  Running, Ideas, People

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.27, Princeton University Press

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• I have outlasted all desire, My dreams and I have grown apart; My grief alone is left entire, The gleamings of an empty heart. The storms of ruthless dispensation Have struck my flowery garland numb, I live in lonely desolation And wonder when my end will come. Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted By tardy winter's whistling chill, A single leaf which has outlasted Its season will be trembling still.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Dream, Lonely, Grief

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• The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dream, Reality, World

  Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.244, Pan Macmillan

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• Every nation has its war party... It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition.

  Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

  War, Party, Tolerate

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• Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

  Walter Lippmann

  Class, People, Church

  Walter Lippmann (2003). “Men of Destiny (Ppr)”, p.99, Transaction Publishers

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• Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Men, Ideas, Self

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.574, Library of America

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• Get the heat and emotion out worry, and put cold, ruthless scrutiny onto the problem, and worry loses its power. When we are worried and filled with apprehension, we become panicky and are likely to see only gloom and failure. There isn't any situation so bad that it won't become a lot better when you think rationally - and spiritually - about it. God gives you the ability to think rationally about things by filling you with peace and faith.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Faith, Peace, Thinking

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• It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Compassion, Men, Justice

  Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). “Freedom from fear: and other writings”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

  Alan Lightman

  Heart, People, Brain

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Dance for Two: Essays”, p.42, Pantheon

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• Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless.

  Thomas Malthus

  Wise, Country, Race

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• The only ‘realistic’ prospect is to ground a new
  political universality by opting for the impossible,
  fully assuming the place of the exception, with no
  taboos, no a priori norms (‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’),
  respect for which would prevent us from ‘resignifying’
  terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of
  sacrifice … if this radical choice is decried by some
  bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!

  Slavoj Žižek

  Heart, Exercise, Sacrifice

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• A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless . . . all a woman has to do is put you on hold.

  Marlo Thomas

  Inspirational, Men, Complaining

  "Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny". Book by Marlo Thomas, September 28, 2010.

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• A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.

  Henry A. Wallace

  Money, Party, Race

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• Cancer is such a ruthless adversary because it behaves as if it has its own fiendishly cunning agenda.

  Paul Davies

  Cancer, Agendas, Cunning

  "Cancer can teach us about our own evolution" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2012.

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