Sheer Quotes - Page 3

• Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.

  Lin Yutang

  Art, Thinking, Play

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• A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

  Thornton Wilder

  Years, People, Gazing

  Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer (1992). “Conversations with Thornton Wilder”, p.72, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Everyone knows the presidential candidates and has an opinion about them. But as you get to smaller races, that evaporates and you can win through sheer elbow grease.

  Joe Greene

  Winning, Race, Presidential

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• Sheer animated fantasy is still my first and deepest production impulse.

  Walt Disney

  Firsts, Fantasy, Animated

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• History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

  Scott Anderson

  Butterfly, Wings, Decision

  Scott Anderson (2013). “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, p.89, Anchor

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• Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters-perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair-may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple a that.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  War, Simple, Despair

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.51, Routledge

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• There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.

  Howard Thurman

  Sea, Numbers, Long

  Howard Thurman (1981). “With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman”, p.148, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The argument that the countries use for the sheer increase in Muslim doctors is the sheer increase in the Muslim population. In for example Birmingham, England where a lot of these guys came from, where one of these plots was hatched, it's up to 30% of the population. Maybe that's the problem?

  Neil Cavuto

  Country, Doctors, Guy

  "Universal Healthcare: Terrorist Recruitment Tool", crooksandliars.com, July 6, 2007.

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• Spending time in Calcutta [India] really did a number on me. The way life and death are almost the same thing, the way poverty is dealt with, the sheer number of dead bodies you see, it's all pretty overwhelming.

  Henry Rollins

  Numbers, Life And Death, Way

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.

  Dan Simmons

  Powerful, Names, Voice

  Dan Simmons (2009). “Carrion Comfort”, p.572, Macmillan

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• That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.

  Irvine Welsh

  Pain, Coffee, Class

  Irvine Welsh (1995). “The Acid House”, p.269, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Thinking, Media, Appreciate

  Comment to the article "Predictible Fakers" by Robin Hanson, www.overcomingbias.com. January 20, 2009.

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• Particular honour belongs to those who believed in the possibility of mechanical flight when all the world was against them; not the visionaries because they hoped for it merely, but those who by sheer force of intellect perceived the means by which it could be accomplished and directed their experiments along the right path. ... The name of Lilienthal is now among the most honoured, but curiously his own countrymen were the last to recognize the value of his work.

  Otto Lilienthal

  Mean, Names, Visionaries

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• Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.

  James Berardinelli

  Writing, White, Years

  "Terminator 2: Judgment Day (United States, 1991)". Movie Review, www.reelviews.net.

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• While all men are born as equals, to say that Brahmins alone are the highest and all others are low as Pariah (the Untouchables) or Panchama is sheer nonsense. It is roguish to say so. It is a big hoax played on us.

  Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

  Men, Hoaxes, Nonsense

  Collected works of Periyar E.V.R., p. 482, 2005.

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• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

  George Orwell

  Party, Writing, Squares

  George Orwell (2001). “Orwell and Politics”, p.459, Penguin UK

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• Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?'

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Confused, People, Pits

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• The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Trying, Mysterious

  Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1926.

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• However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.

  Max Weber

  Mean, Thinking, People

  1922 Collected in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds) Economy and Society (1978), ch.3.

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• We can't afford to stand pat while the world races by. The United States of America did not become the most prosperous nation on Earth by sheer luck or happenstance. We got here because each time a generation of Americans has faced a changing world, we have changed with it. We have not feared our future; we have shaped it.

  Barack Obama

  America, Race, Luck

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• Does it seem that everything is extravagance in the world, or rather madness, when you watch the way things go? A crowd of rogues enjoy blessings they have won by sheer injustice, while more honest folks are miserable and die of hunger.

  Aristophanes

  Blessing, World, Crowds

  Aristophanes (2004). “Plutus (Sparklesoup Classics)”, p.32, Sparklesoup LLC

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• Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.

  C. S. Lewis

  Prayer, Illusion, Concrete

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.145, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

  Tom Stoppard

  Nodding, Fields, Faces

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Jumpers”, p.24, Faber & Faber

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• The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on.

  Paul Westerberg

  Song, Light, Darkness

  Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. May 19, 2008.

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• If the mind is wearied by study, or the body worn with sickness, It is well to lie fallow for a while, in the vacancy of sheer amusement; But when thou prosprest in health, and thine intellect can soar untired, To seek uninstructive pleasure is to slumber on the couch of indolence.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Lying, Mind, Vacancy

  "Proverbial Philosophy (Of Recreation)". Book by Martin Farquhar Tupper, 1839.

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