Unnatural Quotes - Page 13

• You will not think it unnatural that those who have an object depending, which strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclining to superstition.

  Edmund Burke

  Thinking, Superstitions, Should

  Edmund Burke (1847). “The Speeches of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke”, p.531

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• For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.

  Hannah Arendt

  Men, Race, Humanity

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Planning stuff out sucks. If you plan stuff out, you wind up talking in a very monotonous, unnatural way.

  CM Punk

  Talking, Wind, Stuff

  Interview with Tom Breihan, www.gq.com. July 13, 2011.

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• Can you suggest any suitable aspersions to spread abroad about Mrs. Thatcher? It is idle to suggest she has unnatural relations with Mrs. Barbara Castle; what is needed is something socially lower: that she eats asparagus with knife and fork, or serves instant mash potatoes.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Knives, Gossip, Potatoes

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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• I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.

  Florence King

  Party, People, Political

  Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.191, Macmillan

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• of all the deprivations which afflict humankind, none is more dreadful than loneliness. A corrosive, it eats the heart out. People were meant to live by twos, with someone close with whom to share good and bad, to hear breathing in the dark room at night. Being alone is the one unnatural act.

  Zelda Popkin

  Loneliness, Heart, Dark

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• Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don't you agree?

  Boethius

  Mean, Men, Evil

  Boethius (2012). “The Consolation of Philosophy”, p.70, Courier Corporation

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• There's something unnatural about a woman finding babies or, more specifically, conversation about babies, boring. They'll think she's bitter, jealous, lonely. But she's also bored of everybody telling her how lucky she is, what with all that sleep and all that freedom and spare time, the ability to go on dates or head off to Paris at a moments notice. It sounds like they're consoling her, and she resents this and feels patronized by it.

  David Nicholls

  Baby, Lonely, Jealous

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• To be effective, morality has to be reasoned (or worked out). To want ("vouloir", Fr.) to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a sort of training with the help of constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make it an unnatural result, devoided of lastind value.

  African Spir

  Evil, Training, Coercion

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 59), 1937.

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• Trying to act normal is the most unnatural behavior of all.

  Sharyn McCrumb

  Trying, Normal, Behavior

  Sharyn McCrumb (2010). “Lovely in Her Bones”, p.39, Ballantine Books

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• At times there is nothing so unnatural as nature.

  Carolyn Wells

  Nature

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• We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.

  Wendell Berry

  Suicidal, Ephemeral, Sake

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.201, Counterpoint

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• Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

  Erik Naggum

  Numbers, Might, Elegance

  "Filk, puns, and other time wasting". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. October 25, 1998.

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• Hanns Heinz Ewers tells a short story of a boy who was so unnatural of disposition as to take a special delight in people sick with elephantiasis. Our "European intellectuality" finds itself in an identical condition today which, through Jewish pens, worships the Kokoschka, Chagalls and Pechsteins as the leaders of the Art of the future. Features of degeneracy are already apparent, as, for instance, with Schwalbach, who dares representing Jesus as flat footed and bow legged.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Jesus, Art, Boys

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, 1930.

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• There is an immense trout in Loch Awe in Scotland, which is so voracious, and swallows his own species with such avidity, that he has obtained the name 'Salmo Ferox'. I pull about this unnatural monster till he is tired, land him, and administer the coup de grace. Is this cruel? Cruelty should be made of sterner stuff.

  Arnold Gingrich

  Tired, Rivers, Lakes

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• Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Two

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• I always thought it was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith.

  William Shakespeare

  Atheism, Reign, Strife

  William Shakespeare (2013). “Histories of Shakespeare in Plain and Simple English (a Modern Translation and the Original Version)”, p.1266, BookCaps Study Guides

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• It's unnatural to fight somebody who has nothing against you and never did anything to you or to your family, who never stole anything from you. And now you've got to go and try to dismantle this guy.

  Mike Tyson

  Fighting, Guy, Trying

  Interview with Elvis Mitchell, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 23, 2009.

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• I have been Merlin wandering in the woods Of a far country, where the winds waken Unnatural voices , my mind broken By a sudden acquaintance with man's rage.

  R. S. Thomas

  Country, Men, Wind

  "Song at the Year's Turning : Poems, 1942-1954". Book by R. S. Thomas, 1955.

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• How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

  May Sarton

  Passion, Love Is, Views

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.63, Open Road Media

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• Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Long, Perfect, Would Be

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• Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Sleep, Done, Contagious

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• The truest definition of evil is that which represents it as something contrary to nature; evil is evil because it is unnatural; a vine which should bear olive-berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be diseased; an unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of condemnation.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Mother, Eye, Son

  Frederick William Robertson (1858). “Sermons Preached at Trinity Chapel, Brighton: Third Series”, p.23

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• In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted.

  David Brin

  Errors, Law, Trial And Error

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• Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

  August Strindberg

  Failure, Mean, Progress

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