Home / Topics / Conditions Quotes

Conditions Quotes

Browse 4933 quotes about Conditions.

Conditions Quotes

“Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?" The bishop thought it need not be, if encountered in the proper spirit, but he gave a lot of enlightening examples of conditions under which it might be, in his word, "inflammatory." There wasn't much nudity in our neck of the woods, and I enjoyed that article tremendously.”

Source: The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books

“I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.”

Ifs Thinking Country Given Conditions Brother Indian Awards Altered Keepers Inappropriate American Indian Executioners

Author:Marlon Brando

“He that would be content with a mean condition must not cast his eye upon one that is in a far better estate than himself, but let him look upon him that is lower than he is, and, if he see that such a one bears poverty comfortably, it will help to quiet him.”

Ifs Looks Mean Helping Would Be Eye Poverty Conditions Bears Quiet Casts His Eyes Look Up Estates

Book:The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Source: The Works of Anne Bradstreet

“All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.”

Source: Social Statics; Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, & the First of Them Developed

“No adversity is in kind or degree peculiar to us; but if we survey the conditions of other men (of our brethren everywhere, of our neighbours all about us), and compare our case with theirs, we shall find that we have many consorts and associates in adversity, most as ill, many far worse bestead than ourselves; whence it must be a great fondness and perverseness to be displeased that we are not exempted from, but exposed to bear a share in the common troubles and burdens of mankind.”

Ifs Men Kind Common Cases Trouble Share Conditions Mankind Bears Degrees Adversity Ill Burden Compare Peculiar Exposed Associates Neighbour Surveys Brethren Fondness Perverseness

Author:Isaac Barrow

“Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.”

“I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on.”

Ifs Way Two Christ Wonder Support Happened Conditions Planets Percent Garden Scientist Intelligent Arguing Routine Agony Crucifixion Intelligent Life

Book:Flying to America: 45 More Stories

Source: Flying to America: 45 More Stories

“The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.”

Source: Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee

“You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.”

Ifs Men Said Stills States Age Effort Conditions Politician Mass Critics Improvement Granted Welfare Arrogance Inferiors Better Than You Welfare State

Author:Ludwig von Mises

“Two things can get people to make efforts: if people want to get something, or if they want to get rid of something. Only, in ordinary conditions, without knowledge, people do not know what they can get rid of or what they can gain.”

People Ifs Knows Want Two Effort Conditions Ordinary Gains Two Things

Author:P.D. Ouspensky

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature - after the recipe for making eels from flour - is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried the impossibility. If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.”

Ifs Doe Order Teach Doubt Conditions Cry Supreme Absurd Certainty Pleasant Immense Dependence Recipes Impossibility Admirable There Is No God Audacity Flour Eels

Author:Baron d'Holbach

“As we know, the goal of every struggle is victory. But if the proletariat is to achieve victory, all the workers, irrespective of nationality, must be united. Clearly, the demolition of national barriers and close unity between the Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and other proletarians is a necessary condition for the victory of the proletariat of all Russia.”

Ifs Knows Goal United Struggle Achieve Conditions Victory Unity Workers Russia Barriers Polish Nationality Proletariat Armenians Demolition Georgians

Author:Joseph Stalin

“Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.”

Ifs Should Humans Has Beens States Conditions Opening Corporate Human Condition Opening Up

Book:The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America

“If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.”

Ifs Should Humans Doe Conditions Circumstances Consequence Misfortunes Human Condition Disguise Favour Blameless

Author:Anthony Daniels

“The whole time I was a union leader, we had to put up with John Howard and Tony Abbott attacking workers' conditions. I'm proud of being a moderate trade union official, working co-operatively between employees and employers. I'm interested in better wages for workers, better safety, job security, and, profitable companies, because I understand that if you get co-operation in the workplace, everyone wins.”

“I saw my job [as president] as to try to move the world from an unstable condition of interdependence toward more integrated cooperative world community. Therefore, my approach was to cooperate wherever possible and to build institutions of cooperation, an expanded NATO, the World Trade Organization, the Summit of the Americas, the Asian Pacific Leaders, all those, the coalition to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo, to cooperate wherever possible but to act alone if we had to.”

“It's (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.”

People Ifs Knows Humans May Whole My Own Conditions Loneliness Painting Communication Reflection Human Condition Lack Of Communication

Author:Edward Hopper

“I think every once in a while I feel the need to break my medium... if I have been doing a very large painting I like to drop into something in small scale. It is a challenge to go into this size. It is just to hold my own interest, and then each media has its own conditions.”

Ifs Thinking Needs Feels Has Beens Interest Challenges My Own Break Conditions Media Painting Size Scales Mediums

Author:Lee Krasner

“If we increase freight rates, the goods will move through the roads and the condition of the roads will become worse.”

Ifs Moving Conditions Increase Rate Goods

Author:Lalu Prasad Yadav

“For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.”

“If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.”

Ifs Wells May Whole Winning Successful Conditions Development Disease Prepared Ill Population Factors Range Variation Predator Matching

Author:Erik Naggum

“History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.”

Ifs Whole Facts Values Knowledge Conditions Goodness Degrees Elements Foundation Historical Valuable Posse Historical Facts

Book:Contemplation and Action, 1902-14

Source: Contemplation and Action, 1902-14

“If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.”

Ifs Thinking Literature Moral Conditions Sick

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.”

Ifs Would Be Law Order Names Force Effort Conditions Events Research Connections Determine Protest Occupation Endeavor Probability Abstraction Scientific Research

Author:Max Horkheimer

“The bond of family blesses us with an immeasurable power. But we also must accept what comes with it. It gives us a responsibility to love without condition, without apology. We can never waver from the power of that bond, even if it's tested. The bond nourishes us, gives us strength. Without that power, we are nothing.”

Ifs Giving Responsibility Accepting Conditions Bless Apology Tested

Author:Elijah

“It is the condition of our present state to see more than we can attain; the exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence.”

Ifs Writing May Ideas States Failing Conditions Example Objects Duty Perfection Faults Innocence Caution Atonement Hinder Endeavour Vigilance Contagion Admonition

Author:Samuel Johnson

“But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.”

Ifs States Wisdom Politics Individual Term Economy Economic Conditions Citizens Mass Property Liberalism Over It Servitude Economic Freedom

Book:The Crisis Of Civilization

Source: The Crisis Of Civilization

“It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”

Source: A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII

“If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.”

Ifs States Wisdom America Politics Black United Race United States Economy Conditions Revolution Inequality Soil Liberalism Black Race

Author:Alexis de Tocqueville

“A well-developed sense of self is a necessary if not sufficient condition of your well-being. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its absence guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, or despair.”

Ifs Wells Doe Self Conditions Despair Anxiety Absence Well Being Fulfillment Sufficient Guarantees Frustration Sense Of Self

Book:Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality

Source: Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality

“If you dropped me off a space platform onto the ground where a line was drawn, I would fall to the left side of it. I believe the difference between right and left is that the right, for the most part, the bulk of their philosophy is interested in property, and the rights of people to own property and gain and acquire and keep property. And I think on the left - though they blend and mix - on the left primarily you will find people who are more concerned about humans, and the human condition, and what can be done.”

People Ifs Thinking Believe Humans Done Philosophy Fall Left I Believe Sides Differences Lines Space Rights Conditions Gains Concerned Property Acquire Human Condition Platforms

Author:George Carlin

“Some people have to move, physically, to "get" something. But if you're stuck in a chair, that's not your limitation - it's simply not an optimal condition for you.”

People Ifs Moving Conditions Stuck Limitation Chairs Optimal

Author:David Allen

“Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become King of China on condition that you forgot what you have been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time he destroyed you, created a King in China?”

Ifs Has Beens Use Conditions Kings China Destroyed Reincarnation

Author:Gottfried Leibniz

“All conditions and all circumstances in our lives are a result of a certain level of thinking. If we want to change the conditions and circumstances, we have to change the level of thinking that is responsible for it.”

Ifs Thinking Want Certain Levels Results Our Lives Conditions Circumstances Responsible

Author:Albert Einstein

“I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting - so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Want Writing Interesting Written Conditions Letters Plenty

Book:The George Eliot Letters: 1836-1851

Source: The George Eliot Letters: 1836-1851

“Some men make a womanish complaint that it is a great misfortune to die before our time. I would ask what time? Is it that of Nature? But she, indeed, has lent us life, as we do a sum of money, only no certain day is fixed for payment. What reason then to complain if she demands it at pleasure, since it was on this condition that you received it.”

Ifs Men Reason Death Certain Dies Asks Pleasure Conditions Demand Complaining Fixed Our Time Misfortunes Complaints Payment

Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you are hired to shake up the system, do it. No one will believe you're the boss until you do one or more of the following: 1. Add a new division; 2. Lop off a present department; 3. Add new people or reassign and reward present employees; 4. Get rid of deadwood; 5. Change the method of accounting; 6. Change lawyers, accountants, or other outside services; 7. Ask a lot of questions, and demand answers by a certain date; 8. Get in touch with key people in your industry or city and arrange personal meetings; 9. Improve working conditions; 10. Update present benefit plans.”

“Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.”

Source: Critical and miscellaneous essays, collected and republ

“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”

Ifs Men Humans Art Seems Law Conditions Spread Speed Civilized Association Precise Human Society

Book:Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America

“Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation.”

Ifs Suffering Results Vision Struggle Conditions Possibility Misery Miserable Outcomes Sheer Desperation Energetic Spurs

Book:Anarchism: Top Crime Collections

Source: Anarchism: Top Crime Collections

“Belief in God is almost universal and the effect of this belief is so vast that one is appalled at the thought of what social conditions would be if reverence for God were erased from every heart.”

Ifs Heart Would Be Belief Social Conditions Effects Universal Reverence Belief In God Social Conditions

Book:In His Image: By William Jennings Bryan

Source: In His Image: By William Jennings Bryan

“I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from an obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.”

Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London, relative to that event. In a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris ... The seventh edition

“If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.”

Source: The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill

“We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. ... while everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.”

Ifs Way Humans Kind Long Doe Able Evil Causes Human Beings Conditions Horror Protest Rebel Scream Monstrous Deep Inside Adapting

Book:Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

“In those days, young stars, male and female, were all virgins until married, and if divorced, they returned magically to that condition.”

Ifs Young Stars Conditions Married Female Males Virgins Divorced Virginity

Author:Shelley Winters

“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness.”

Ifs Book Soul Body Remember Forget Existence Sea Conditions Opposites Forgetfulness True Ones

Book:The Nazarene

Source: The Nazarene

“God's grace is so counterintuitive and everything we do in our life is just based on conditions. You do this for me and I'll do that for you. Or if you don't do this for me, I won't do that for you. And God's grace works in a completely different direction.”

Ifs Different Life Is Grace Our Lives Conditions God's Grace Different Directions

Author:Tullian Tchividjian

“Red has been praised for its nobility of the color of life. But the true color of life is not red. Red is the color of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the color of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the color of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste.”

Ifs Has Beens Life Is Violence Conditions Color Broken Waste Red Betrayal Visible Nobility Edited True Colors Colors Of Life

Author:Alice Meynell

“When you buy a jacket, you pick the size to ensure it fits. Similarly, we live in a universe in which the amount of dark energy fits our biological make-up. If the amount of dark energy were substantially different from what we've measured, the environmental conditions would be inhospitable to our form of life.”

Ifs Different Would Be Form Universe Energy Dark Conditions Amount Fit Picks Environmental Size Jackets Dark Energy

Author:Brian Greene

“But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.”

Ifs Thinking Should Humans Kind Shows Literature Social Common Conditions Awareness Reader Commitment Nerves Manifest Touching Slips Human Condition

Author:Bel Kaufman