T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it - and if you don't, you die.”
“The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…
If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.”
“The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.”
“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
Source: The Painted Word
“The notion that the records of government are the property of the people is radically democratic, but it is broken in practice.”
“The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
“The notion that the staging of the play Harry Potter should be raw magic and street theater rather than high-tech theater, was essential.”
“The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government. The Supreme Court is not the supreme branch. And for God's sake, it isn't the Supreme Being. It is the Supreme Court.”
“The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that, “does right” and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing their best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.”
“The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.”
“The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.”
“The notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.”
“The notion
that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to
accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you
know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”
Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The notion that we have to choose between civil liberties, and national security is a disgrace. A country that wants a democracy must accept transparency”
Source: Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World
“The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that.
We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.”
“The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won't sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.”
“The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known - almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid - and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules.”
“The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.”
Source: Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
“The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.”
Source: Lee Krasner: paintings from 1965 to 1970
“The notion that women shouldn't care about personal success -- or the work that gets them there -- is disengenuous; it is impossible for women not to have jobs anymore, so it doesn't make sense to expect them to structure their lives around getting married. The real failure is our cultural incapacity to make room for women to live and thrive outside of traditional conceptions of femininity and relationships. After all, we can eat without marriage, but not without work.”
“The notion that work is a burden is a terrible mistake. Working and facing up to one's responsibilities: That's happiness.”
“The notion that writings created at a time when men huddled in superstitious terror from an eclipse can possibly be a credible representation of the Creator (whatever that word means to each person) is so absurd as to border on delusional.”
“The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.”
“The notion that you do not negotiate with terrorists is not the history of humanity or of the world.”
“The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods.”
“The notion that you have a blind trust but you can tell your trustee when to sell stock in it just doesn't make any sense. It means you have a seeing eye trust and not a blind trust. It's ridiculous.”
“The notion that you would initiate a new product without preparing the way by persuasion and advertising and salesmanship is fantastic. It's an integral part of the system.”
“The notion, the invention of a country, is fairly new in the history of mankind. We tend to forget that. We want to protect our country. The country is something that's fairly new. It's 250 years old, maybe 300 years old, so it's bound to change and evolve also. Migration is part of that.”
“The notions of a young man of one or two and twenty,' said he, 'as to what is necessary in manners to make him quite the thing, are more absurd, I believe, than those of any other set of beings in the world. The folly of the means they often employ is only to be equalled by the folly of what they have in view.”
“The notions of going to work, putting in set hours, and getting 'face time' are increasingly antiquated ideas. Because of technology we have entered a modern era of work where we can work from wherever we want, whenever we want and we can be more productive and make greater contributions than ever before.”
“The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations.”
“The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. "If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are." "If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted." "If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitievely debunked, we can go right on assuming it's truth." No, you can't.”
“The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.”
Source: Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
“The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”
Source: Illuminations
“The nourishment from barbecue is palatable.”
“The nourishment is palatable.”
“The nourishment of body is food, while the nourishment of the soul is feeding others.”
“The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.”
“The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.”
Source: Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997
“The Nova Scotian black community always remembered Viola Desmond - they didn't lose track of her, ever. Her memory was very much alive there, but the rest of us didn't know anything about her. It's just so typical of Canadians that we know Rosa Parks, in that "bad country to the south of us" - they needed this lovely, courageous woman to sit down in the front of the bus - but we wouldn't know ours, because of course we "don't have racism in Canada."”
“The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.”
“The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.”
Source: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
“The novel as private I.”
“The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.”
“The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.”
“The novel, by working with the interplay of durations, and inviting the reader to interact with them, has the capacity to pay a double, triple, multiple allegiance to the weird workings of time, to our common sense idea of its ongoing sequence as well as to what living-in-time can actually feel like, filling it and distorting it.”
Source: The Long Form
“The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.”
“The novel cannot submit to authority.”
Source: Juno & Juliet
“The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.”
“The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world.”
Source: Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation