Admirable Quotes - Page 12

• I always think it's far more admirable to confuse people than it is to reassure them.

  Will Sheff

  Thinking, People

  Interview with Sean Michaels, believermag.com. May 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are good intentions behind many peoples conversion to veganism, including an admirable devotion to the well-being of animals and a justified skepticism about the crap the USDA allows manufacturers to put in our food. But its hard to ignore the often sanctimonious nature of what some nutritionists view as an extremist way of eating.

  Julie Klausner

  Animal, Views, Way

  4 Copy quote

• Education is an admirable thing.

  Oscar Wilde

  Epigrams: Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young Sebastian Melmoth

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

  David Graeber

  People, Population, Asking

  "The Bully’s Pulpit". thebaffler.com. July 2015.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

  William Stafford

  People

  William Stafford (1977). “Stories that could be true: new and collected poems”, HarperCollins Publishers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.

  Henry David Thoreau

  War, Heart, Order

  Henry David Thoreau (2002). “The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: Selected and Edited by Lewis Hyde”, p.202, North Point Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.

  Noam Chomsky

  Modern, China

  "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?". Noam Chomsky during Debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, chomsky.info. December 15, 1967.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable;even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Thinking, Law, Government

  Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden and Other Writings”, p.108, Bantam Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly.

  Galileo Galilei

  Generations, Noble, Earth

  Galileo Galilei (1967). “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, Second Revised Edition”, p.58, Univ of California Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy; for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment.

  Charles Lindbergh

  War, Soldier, Training

  Journal entry on July 21, 1944. "The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh". Book by Charles Lindbergh, 1970.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.

  Oriah Dreamer

  Hurt, Children, Pain

  4 Copy quote

• If that one is already a great artist, who knows how to educe from a small piece of wood the face of a king or of a queen, an ant or a camel, how great then is the mastery which can form as actuality everything which is in all potentiality? Therefore, God, who is able to produce from the most minute piece of matter the similitude of all forms which can be in this world and in infinitely many worlds, is of admirable subtlety.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Kings, Queens, Artist

  6 Copy quote

• I respect so many people, but I guess I'd have to say Madonna. Not being cliché or anything because she and I don't share a similar sound, but I truly respect how she's been in the game so long and developed so much over time and really did it her way. It's admirable. I want something like that.

  Kat Dahlia

  Long, People, Share

  4 Copy quote

• Is it stupidity or is it moral cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass against us? Is it blindness, or is it an insance inconsistency, which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for small ones suffered? Surely our barbarian code of right needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should be somewhat changed.

  Herbert Spencer

  Revenge, Sacrifice, Men

  Herbert Spencer (1910). “Works: The study of sociology”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sundry manifestations of nature in men and women, are greatly perverted by existing social conventions upheld by both. There are feelings which, under our predatory régime, with its adapted standard of propriety, it is not considered manly to show; but which, contrariwise, are considered admirable in women. Hence repressed manifestations in the one case, and exaggerated manifestations in the other; leading to mistaken estimates.

  Herbert Spencer

  Men, Feelings, Social

  HERBERT SPENCER (1874). “THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY”, p.421

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Passion, Mind, Liberty

  "Liberalism in Caricature". Review of "The Anti-Capitalist Mentality", The Economist Magazine, April 13, 1957.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

  Louis Aragon

  Flower, Garden, Errors

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Order, Eels, Doubt

  8 Copy quote

• David Ray Griffin has done admirable and painstaking research in reviewing the mysteries surrounding the 9/11 attacks. It is the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation [into] that historic and troubling event.

  Howard Zinn

  Rays, Events, Done

  10 Copy quote

• Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.

  James F. Cooper

  Book, Writing, Hebrew

  "Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper". Book by James Fenimore Cooper, Journal kept by Cooper from January to May 1848, 1922.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best companion and helper is admirable morals.

  Ali ibn Abi Talib

  Moral, Companion, Helpers

  "'Bihar al-Anwar' ('Seas of Lights')". Hadith book by Mohammad-Baqer Majlesi, Volume 77,

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• The stately heavens which glory doth array, are mirrors of God's admirable might; there, whence forth spreads the night, forth springs the day. He fix'd the fountains of this temporal light, where stately stars enstall'd, some stand, some stray, all sparks of his great power (though small) yet bright. By what none utter can, no, not conceive. All of his greatness, shadows may perceive.

  William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling

  Stars, Spring, Greatness

  7 Copy quote

• Loving your homeland is just as natural as loving your father or mother - after all, your country nourishes you, protects you, and in many ways makes you who you are. Just as it's a virtue to honor your parents, it's a good and admirable thing to honor the land you call home.

  William Bennett

  Mother, Country, Father

  William J. Bennett, John T.E. Cribb (2013). “The American Patriot's Almanac: Daily Readings on America”, p.14, Thomas Nelson

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• The labeling of nociceptors as pain fibers was not an admirable simplification, but an unfortunate trivialization under the guise of simplification.

  Patrick David Wall

  Pain, Fiber, Injury

  10 Copy quote