Serious Quotes - Page 23

• I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

  Martin Amis

  Children, Book, Writing

  "Martin Amis: Only brain injury could make me write for children" by Benedicte Page, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2011.

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• The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

  Henry Adams

  Crush, Attitude, Perfect

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.283, Booklassic

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• Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

  George Orwell

  Democratic Socialism, Serious Work, Lines

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.314, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• By all means, there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

  Margaret Sanger

  Mother, Children, Father

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• The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.

  Margaret Sanger

  Expression, Community, Progress

  Margaret Sanger, Michael W. Perry, H. G. Wells (2003). “The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic”, p.345, Inkling Books

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• My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.

  Lincoln Steffens

  Father, Mistake, Parent

  Lincoln Steffens (1962). “The World of Lincoln Steffens”

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• People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

  Chinua Achebe

  People, Common Sense, Demand

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• The current political tension is very serious. We have not yet ruled out a boycott of the election.

  Abhisit Vejjajiva

  Political, Election, Currents

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• From this I conclude that the best education for the situations of actual life consists of the experience we acquire from the study of serious history. For it is history alone which without causing us harm enables us to judge what is the best course in any situation or circumstance.

  Polybius

  Judging, Study, Harm

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• There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious. I think the fate not only of our own civilization, but I think the fate of world and the future of the human race, is involved in preventing a nuclear war.

  John F. Kennedy

  War, Fate, Thinking

  Third Nixon-Kennedy Presidential Debate, October 13, 1960.

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• If a man's aspirations towards a righteous life are serious.. .if he earnestly and sincerely seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food, because, not to mention the excitement of the passions produced by such food, it is plainly immoral, as it requires an act contrary to moral feeling, i. e., killing - and is called forth only by greed.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Passion, Men, Animal

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• If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.... It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.

  Mike Huckabee

  Rights, Government, Civilization

  "Huckabee Denies He Ever Called For Quarantining AIDS Patients, Contradicts His Own Comments". The Associated Press Interview, thinkprogress.org. 1992.

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• It's kind of like sentencing. A lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. Wrong. In most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Country, Light, Punishment

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• There is an element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Israel, Views, Elements

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• Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a war based on false claims.

  Wesley Clark

  War, Claims, Violation

  Wesley Clark's speech at the conference of Military Reporters and Editors, October 2003.

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• The appeal of science fiction has always been its iconoclasm . . . But in order to be an iconoclast, an author must be more than merely aware of the idol he wishes to destroy. He must be intimate with it and understand it in all its aspects. This means that he must have devoted serious thought to it, and have beliefs of his own which will stand up in the place of the broken idol. In other words, any child can complain, but it takes an adult to clash with accepted beliefs . . . an adult with ideas.

  Alfred Bester

  Children, Mean, Order

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• We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Children, Pregnancy, Writing

  "Stories for Children". Book by Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1984.

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• Chess is difficult, it demands work, serious reflection and zealous research.

  Wilhelm Steinitz

  Reflection, Demand, Chess

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• Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

  Garry Kasparov

  Impact, Russia, Ukraine

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• Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Teacher, Real, Book

  Diana Wynne Jones (2012). “Reflections”, p.158, Random House

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• Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

  Andrew Carnegie

  Wise, Race, Charity

  Andrew Carnegie (2006). “The Gospel of Wealth Essays and Other Writings”, p.19, Penguin

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• A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.

  Stephen Crane

  Men, Tree, Firsts

  Stephen Crane (1994). “The Red Badge of Courage”, p.60, Wordsworth Editions

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• It is a mistake for a taciturn, serious-minded woman to marry a jovial man, but not for a serious-minded man to marry a lighthearted woman.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Mistake, Women, Taciturn

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• But I really think it's a very unfortunate part of our judicial system and I would feel much, much better if more states would really consider whether they think the benefits outweigh the very serious potential injustice, because in these cases the emotions are very, very high on both sides and to have stakes as high as you do in these cases, there is a special potential for error. We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

  John Paul Stevens

  Thinking, Years, Numbers

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• I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Thinking, Practice

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