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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

  David Hockney

  Photography, Art, Taken

  Lawrence Weschler, David Hockney, Getty Foundation (2008). “True to life: twenty-five years of conversations with David Hockney”, Univ of California Pr

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• When you 'make good,' you find out who your real friends are. You find out pretty quick. And it's a very ambivalent feeling, because you're, like, happy you found out that people are [jerkfaces], but you're kinda sad because you think, 'Wow, I wasted so much time being this person's friend.'

  Greg Camp

  Real, Thinking, People

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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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• My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.

  Andre Dubus

  Dream, Writing, Black And White

  Source: thekingsenglish.wordpress.com

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• The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Ideas, Wielding Power, Problem

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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 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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• 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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