Quotessence
Home / Quotes / D Quotes

D Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with D. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All D Quotes

“Despite this documentation for both traumatic amnesia and essentially accurate delayed recall, memory science is often presented as if it supports the view that traumatic amnesia is very unlikely or perhaps impossible and that a great many, perhaps a majority, maybe even all, recovered memories of abuse are false…Yet no research supports such an implication and a great deal of research supports the premise that forgetting sexual abuse is fairly common. and that recovered memories are sometimes essentially true.”

“Despite this historic influence, Sanusi (Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Sanusi) has elicited very little interest from Western scholars of Islam in the twentieth century. He is a striking example of just how dramatically the canon of Islamic religious thinkers has shifted in modern times. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, Sanusi was arguably a much more influential and mainstream figure in Sunni Islam than the fourteenth-century Hanbali purist Ibn Taymiyya. Today, Ibn Taymiyya is widely considered to have been a central figure in Islamic religious history, whereas Sanusi is little known even to specialists in Arabic and Islamic studies and often confused with the nineteenth century founder of the Sanusiyya Sufi order.”

“Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 80 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.”

“Despite this inundation of rape imagery, where we are immersed in a rape culture—one that is overly permissive toward all manner of sexual violence—not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. The right stories are not being told, or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape in the right ways. Perhaps we too casually use the term “rape culture” to address the very specific problems that rise from a culture mired in sexual violence. Should we, instead, focus on “rapist culture” because decades of addressing “rape culture” has accomplished so little?”

“Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.”

“Despite trials, worldly confusion, and caustic voices, we can trust in the Lord and go forward with happy hearts, knowing that with every challenge or problem, there's the strength to go on. Why? Because we know His promises are real, that He does know us by name and has a plan for each of us. He will help us learn what it is and give us joy in doing it.”

“Despite two decisions, in 2008 and 2010, by the U.S. Supreme Court unequivocally affirming that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms against infringement by the government, state legislatures continue to do just that - enact laws that significantly infringe this fundamental human right.”

“Despite wanting to work in publishing, I was a publisher's worst nightmare: I rarely bought new books. So my goal was to publish the kind of books I would buy, and read. My reading habits have changed since starting the press. The only other "goal", per say, is to continue to experiment. I don't want the press to ever fall into a formula, or to be pigeonholed - "They do great reissues of modernist poets!" - I want to keep pushing, exploring the kind of title we can get away with. And working with authors who challenge the way I think about writing, editing and reading.”

“Despite what I had acchieved, I don't for a moment think I am any braver or better than anyone else. This is how I attempt to explain what gives me the stregnth to do what I do; when that thunderbolt of an idea first hit me and inspired me to row across oceans, it filled me with a sense of purpose so strong that it overcame my fears. Even when boredom, frustration, fatigue or despair threatened to overwhelm me, it was that powerful sense of purpose that kept me going.”

“Despite what I said about staying the way we were, I changed. I, who have always believed in speaking my mind and made it my mission to uncover the truth, have found myself keeping secrets. Sometimes life is more complicated than the simple rules we make for it.”

“Despite what people tell you, what you do for the majority of the day is who you are. For most people, that is their job, and if you’re not careful now, if you’re not putting your entire effort into every subject to see which ones suit you best, if you’re not taking advantage of every opportunity with the time you have right now while you're still young, you’ll never have a good understanding of yourself or your gifts. You’ll wind up picking a major at college that you don’t feel passionate about, because you don’t even know what your passion is.”

“Despite what you may believe, you can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can make mistakes and still be capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love. Everyone has disappointed someone they care about. Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes. Not because we’re inadequate or fundamentally inept, but because we’re imperfect and fundamentally human. Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for failure.”

“Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.”