Ambivalent Quotes - Page 2

• I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Kings, Real, Opposites

  "Sherlock Holmes star Benedict Cumberbatch says role saves him from geek typecast". www.mirror.co.uk. July 29, 2010.

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• Sometimes compromise is important. Sometimes it's better to give in to someone else's wishes in order to have fun as a group or as a couple, or for the benefit of the team. Sometimes compromise is dangerous. We need to guard against compromising our standards to gain the approval or love of someone else. Decide when you can, and when you cannot, compromise. If it's not harmful and you are ambivalent about a decision, then compromise. If it could lead to breaking your values, compromise isn't a good idea.

  Melody Beattie

  Couple, Fun, Team

  Melody Beattie (2009). “More Language of Letting Go: 366 New Daily Meditations”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

  Eric Fischl

  Sarcastic, Art, Couple

  "Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas". Book by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2012.

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• Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.

  Rene Konig

  Fashion, Sex, Men

  René König (1973). “A la Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion”

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• The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Attitude, War, America

  "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives". Book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1997.

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• America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, America, Rehabilitation

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• You hated him in the movies! Now you're ambivalent.

  Steve Higgins

  Hated

  "Jimmy Fallon: The New King of Late Night TV" by Jeanne Marie Laskas, www.gq.com. March 20, 2013.

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• The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.

  Primo Levi

  Country, Retirement, Military

  "Other People's Trades" by Primo Levi, ("Ex-Chemist"), 1985.

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• I'd like to see a much more open Monarchy, myself. I used to think they were completely useless and we should get rid of them. I don't necessarily feel that way anymore. I'm still ambivalent, I still loathe the British class system, and the Royal family are the apex of the British class system.

  Helen Mirren

  Thinking, Class System, Royal

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• We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

  Erica Jong

  Baby, Sleep, Perfection

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• No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.

  Colin Hanks

  School, People, Doe

  "Colin Hanks gets 'Lucky' with killer film, TV show". Interview with Zorianna Kit, www.reuters.com. July 15, 2011.

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• The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Men, Philadelphia, Long

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• Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?

  Robert Pozen

  Running, Wall, People

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• When asked at age 7 whether he had ambivalent feelings about girls. No, I hate 'em!

  Colin Johnson

  Girl, Hate, Feelings

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• The American public is somewhat ambivalent about what they expect out of thenational forest.

  Ralph Regula

  Forests

  "Members Go Out on a Limb Over National Forests". www.cnn.com. April 18, 1998.

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• Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of political economy, but
  that society is now a reflex of key shifts in music theory and practice....
  [Sampladelia is] the sound made by those early-twentieth-century discoveries
  in particle physics and relativiity theory, the projection of the minds of
  Einstein, Heisenbery, and Bohr, their fateful explorations of liquid time,
  curving space, uncertainty fields and relativity theorems, into densely
  configured and fully ambivalent android music tracks

  Arthur Kroker

  Discovery, Practice, Space

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• I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic involvement with Burroughs was entirely due to my tutor at Oxford, Peter Conrad. I was discussing with him the idea of staying on to do graduate work and when I tossed the name of Burroughs into the conversation - well, he let it fall loudly onto the floor, and proceeded to cross himself as if warding off an evil spirit. Since I was very ambivalent about an academic career in any case, that decided it for me.

  Oliver Harris

  Book, Fall, Names

  Source: bigother.com

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• When you're dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you're constantly on guard, grappling with questions of trust.

  Adam Grant

  Grappling

  "Give & Take with Adam Grant, Top Contrarian Self-Help Expert". Interview with Marty Nemko, www.psychologytoday.com. December 31, 2015.

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• I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wanted to adopt Project X. Errol was a hoot. I loved talking with him. We were a good match, too, because we both kept joking that we'd found the only other person on earth more ambivalent than we were about the project.

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Talking, Directors

  Source: therumpus.net

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• He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.

  Alastair Campbell

  Believe, Independent, Paper

  "Alastair Campbell on spin, Iraq and a recurring nightmare about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown". Interview with Simon Kelner, www.independent.co.uk. March 25, 2016.

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• What worries some people about consumption (and I confess at the outset to be one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in paradise) is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more and more focused not on consuming to live but living to consume. The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is that it has become so all-consuming.

  Rodney Clapp

  Worry, People, Historical

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• Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

  Phillip Lopate

  Contradictory, Essays, Strands

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I focus on the task and try and do it as best we can. And we're constantly evolving it, because it's my way of trying to make sense of all these ambivalent feelings I have.

  Jon Stewart

  Focus, Feelings, Trying

  "Bill Moyers talks with Jon Stewart". "Bill Moyers Journal", www.pbs.org. April 27, 2007.

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• I was watching MTV and there were girls dancing in suspended cages. That would be an ambivalent situation: "I'm trapped! ...but enjoying the music".

  Demetri Martin

  Funny, Girl, Humor

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• I think it's still difficult to write about motherhood and anxiety, that talking about not wanting to be a mother or feeling ambivalent about motherhood makes people uneasy. The ambivalent mother is certainly much more interesting.

  Laurie Foos

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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