Benign Quotes - Page 6

• I take a benign view of digital connectedness. I notice in most young people's lives, Facebook and such doesn't replace normal dating or hanging out, it just facilitates it.

  David Brooks

  Views, People, Dating

  "Ask the Author Live: David Brooks on the Composure Class". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. January 7, 2011.

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• Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.

  Roger Ebert

  Children, Kids, Fighting

  "My Neighbor Totoro Movie Review" by Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.com. December 23, 2001.

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• Rule by the statist elite is not benign or simply a matter of who happens to be in office: it is rule by a growing army of leeches and parasites battening off the income and wealth of hard-working Americans, destroying their property, corrupting their customs and institutions, sneering at their religion.

  Murray Rothbard

  Hard Work, Army, Office

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• When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting, and if we laugh at all, then it is what Beckett calls the "mirthless laugh", which laughs at that which is unhappy.

  Simon Critchley

  Animal, Hunting, Laughing

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• O admirable Mother of God! How many sins have I committed for which thou hast obtained pardon for me, and how many others would I have committed if thou hadst not preserved me? How often have I seen myself on the brink of Hell in obvious danger of falling into it but for thy most benign hand which saved me? How often would the Roaring Lion of Hell have devoured and swallowed up my soul had not the charity of thy heart opposed him? Alas! Without thee, my dearest and my all-good Mother, where should I be today? I should be in the fiery furnace of Hell from which I would never emerge!

  John Eudes

  Mother, Fall, Heart

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• Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Order, Habit, Obeying

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• If one insists on calling all unsuccessful efforts failures the meaning of failure is really quite benign. When trying anything new or taking on any challenge, unsuccessful efforts are an essential aspect of skill building.

  Michael Josephson

  Skills, Effort, Challenges

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• Empathy is a human trait. But lots of humans exercise some traits more energetically than others. By "the usefulness of empathy" I mean the way in which a progressive might claim that empathy is a crucial aspect of any benign political system, and the way a conservative might argue that not only is it not necessary, but it might not even be all that helpful, in that regard.

  Jim Shepard

  Mean, Exercise, Empathy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Many people just won't connect the social problems with the history of dispossession of the aboriginals. There is one problem with pro-Palestinian activists in Europe and the U.S. with the way they portray Israel as though it were an island of evil in an ocean of goodwill. Unfortunately we are not. This world is not made of benign, progressive states with Israel as the one exception.

  Amira Hass

  Ocean, Islands, Israel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.

  Bill McKibben

  Real, Community, Google

  Source: sierraclub.typepad.com

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• The social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy, but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as benign while the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly defines everyone as either a snitch or a terrorist.

  Henry Giroux

  Media, Culture, Invasion

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [But] they can't kill music. God knows, they've tried. But music always wins. As long as there's kids coming up that have a passion. All the bean counters in the world can't kill that. You know? You just can't. They can try, of course, to feed you the most puerile, benign horse manure, but some kid's going to come along and demand something more than that.

  John Hiatt

  Horse, Passion, Kids

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• Dynamic benign neglect.

  Bob Weir

  Neglect

  Source: medium.com

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• Where the heart is full of kindness which seeks no injury to another, either in act or thought or wish, this full love creates an atmosphere of harmony, whose benign power touches with healing all who come within its influence. Peace in the heart radiates peace to other hearts, even more surely than contention breeds contention.

  Patanjali

  Kindness, Healing, Heart

  Patanjali (2015). “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

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• Working anti-social shifts in a difficult environment is undoubtedly challenging. But even militant staff may privately concede that some of the working conditions they enjoy are unusually benign.

  Simon Calder

  Challenges, May, Working Conditions

  Source: www.independent.co.uk

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• A lot of women these days, a lot of young women don't want to call themselves feminists. You have this cheap, hideous 'girl power' sort of fad, which I think is pretty benign at best, but at worst, I think it's a way of taking the politics out of feminism and making it some kind of fashion.

  Ani DiFranco

  Girl, Fashion, Thinking

  "Interview: Righteous Babe Ani DiFranco". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September 8, 1999.

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• It's very benign, it seems, to think, "There's a tree." In fact, it's a very beautiful thought. If someone chops down all the trees, then we think, "Oh, my goodness, something is out of order in my world." We begin to think, "Who am I in a world without trees?"

  Byron Katie

  Beautiful, Thinking, Order

  Source: rayhemachandra.com

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• The gods in Yoruba mythology are not remote at all. They're benign, they're malign, they are mischievous, like Eshu for instance, tricksters, rascally, fornicators, that's a similarity to Greek mythology, for instance, you know. They're not saints, they're not saints. They're powerful. It's why they're not tyrannical. Of course, a number of them are also very, you know, benevolent, you know, there are saintly virtues to be found in them.

  Wole Soyinka

  Powerful, Numbers, Greek

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• Lying is common in social life, often done for benign purposes, seldom draws severe sanctions, and many of the most notable leaders, including the late Steve Jobs, were consummate prevaricators. Told with enough persistence and conviction, what was once untrue can become true, in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Jobs, Lying, Persistence

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Let's finish with Guccifer. My communication with him is now entirely public. It is benign.Secondarily, the timing of my communication is after, not before, I write a story for Breitbart regarding the hacking. And I never defend him from not being a Russian agent in that piece.

  Roger Stone

  Communication, Writing, Stories

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• The internet is like a surround system, a landscape at its most benign, a closed system of surveillance and self-surveillance at its more sinister. Something we can no longer imagine an outside of.

  Tom Burr

  Self, Landscape, Surveillance

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Italians in particular are seen as either benign and child-like (the sweet old nonna with her meatballs), menacing mobsters, or hyper-sexualized housewives and gigolos; the kind of nourishment I'm looking for doesn't lie in any of these stereotypes.

  Christopher Castellani

  Sweet, Children, Lying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My tumour is a benign pituitary tumour, in the pituitary gland - which is the main hormone centre of the body. It's in the centre of the brain. (Fun fact, [Rene] Descartes thought our consciousness was to be found in the pituitary gland.) And the thing is, there aren't really many symptoms that show until it's too late.

  John Newman

  Fun, Brain, Too Late

  Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk

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• Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!

  Daniel Dennett

  Responsibility, Medicine, People

  "Thank Goodness!" by Daniel C. Dennett, www.edge.org. November 2, 2006.

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• At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore's face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye moody was more terrible than Harry could have ever imagined. There was no benign smile upon Dumbledore's face, no twinkle in the eyes behind the spectacles. There was cold fury in every line of the ancient face; a sense of power radiated from Dumbledore as though he were giving off burning heat.

  J. K. Rowling

  Eye, People, Giving

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