Blunt Quotes - Page 8

• When you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt you edge...If you keep your armies out in the field for a long time, your supplies will be insufficient. Transportation of provisions itself consumes 20 times the amount transported.

  Sun Tzu

  Army, Winning, Long

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• The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

  Claudia Rankine

  Past, Tomorrow, Instruments

  Claudia Rankine (2014). “Citizen: An American Lyric”, p.65, Macmillan

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• Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Advice, Admonition

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• I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.

  Erma Bombeck

  Mother, Children, Rags

  Erma Bombeck (1996). “Four of a Kind: A Suburban Field Guide”, Bbs Publishing Corporation

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• Tis chiefly taste, or blunt, or gross, or fine,
  Makes life insipid, bestial, or divine.
  Better be born with taste to little rent
  Than the dull monarch of a continent;
  Without this bounty which the gods bestow,
  Can Fortune make one favorite happy?
  No.

  John Armstrong

  Dull, Littles, Taste

  John Armstrong, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The Poems of Armstrong and Johnson”, p.89

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• Recreation is intended to the mind as whetting is to the scythe, to sharpen the edge of it, which otherwise would grow dull and blunt,--as good no scythe as no edge.

  Joseph Hall

  Mind, Dull, Scythes

  Joseph Hall (1839). “The Works of Joseph Hall: Latin theology with translations”, p.174

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• Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

  Erica Jong

  Voice, Silence, Guilt

  Erica Jong (2013). “Fear of Flying: 40th Anniversary Edition”, p.153, Open Road Media

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• Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dullness that they blunt the sense and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later - that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences.

  Margaret Fuller

  Baby, Children, Book

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• Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear. Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible until it was touched and then it cut deep. Now it is so blunt that it merely bruises and leaves ugly marks.

  Mary Astor

  Beautiful, Sex, Cutting

  Mary Astor (1971). “A life on film”

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• I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

  Storm Jameson

  Children, Silly, Use

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• It seems to me that actual democracy is where all of us get to participate and it's not just a sort of a blunt little dry hump in a ballot box, but an actual penetrative process.

  Russell Brand

  Democracy, Dry, Littles

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• I found early on in teaching, if you're too blunt an instrument, the students discredit you and think you're just being mean. They're not interested in what you have to say.

  Tim Gunn

  Teaching, Mean, Thinking

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• My cut is blunt and futuristic, and Nicki Minaj started wearing that bob on her head after she came to my show, so at the end of the day, I know what I do, and I know what I possess, and I know who I am. I'm a trendsetter. The biggest form of flattery is imitation, so I'm flattered.

  Lil' Mama

  Cutting, Who I Am, The End Of The Day

  "Lil Mama On Her Style Evolution; Nicki Minaj & Being A Curse-Free Rapper". Interview with Tray Hova, www.vibe.com. June 15, 2011.

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• Worry is anti-trust. If you're worried, you don't trust something: your kids, their friends, strangers, the church, even God. Can He take care of your children? Certainly. Jesus says, 'I tell you, stop being anxious and worried about your life.' Pretty blunt. Stop it! Easier said than done, huh? Worry tests your trust, so hand your children to God and let Him babysit your babies when you're not around. He's pretty good at it!

  Max Lucado

  Baby, Jesus, Children

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• Let me be very blunt: the heterosexual transmission of AIDS is, in Africa, a function of truly pathological promiscuity. So this is really a violence issue - not the same violence we deal with in Boston, where teenagers stab and shoot each other, but the violence of African men who are killing themselves, and killing African women and children, with pathological promiscuity.

  Eugene Rivers

  Children, Teenager, Men

  "Silence is Death". Interview with Eva Thorne, bostonreview.net. April/May 1999.

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• Time, whose millioned accidents creep in betwixt vows, and change decrees of kings, tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharpest intents, divert strong minds to the course of altering things.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Kings, Mind

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• I have had a number of less-than-enviable moments in my life when dealing with other people. I won't attempt to blunt that by saying I am not the only one.

  Henry Rollins

  Numbers, People, Moments

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• For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Teaching, Reading, Mean

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• My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

  Pat Conroy

  Mother, Children, Father

  Pat Conroy (2016). “A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life”, p.144, Nan A. Talese

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• Blunt force didn't knock out the drug epidemic. 21 million Americans are addicted to drugs or alcohol. And half of all federal inmates are in for drug crimes.

  Michael Botticelli

  Epidemics, Alcohol, Drug

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• I see that I have been engaged to Emily [Blunt] without ever asking her. The big question I had was, do you think I would ask her to marry me through 'Hello' magazine? Would I do something like that? Would she allow that to happen? It is completely ridiculous.

  Michael Buble

  Thinking, Asking, Magazines

  "Patiences pays off for Michael Buble". Interview with the Associated Press, www.nbcnews.com. May 25, 2007.

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• I want to be blunt: We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work, and access to birth control, in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago - until the Republicans brought them back.

  Elizabeth Warren

  Fighting, Issues, Equal Pay

  "Elizabeth Warren-Scott Brown Debate: Candidates Face Off In Springfield" By Luke Johnson, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 10, 2012.

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• Thank you for this lovely blunt object that I will forevermore use as a weapon against self-doubt.

  Anne Hathaway

  Self, Lovely, Doubt

  "70th Golden Globe Awards (TV Special)". www.imdb.com. 2013.

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• One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms.

  Lewis Henry Steiner

  Mean, Men, Differences

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• Placing a time limit on affirmative action would in all likelihood blunt the orchestrated politics of controversy that now bedevils it. And thinking about phasing it into a class-based entitlement program may at long last bring Americans around to a consideration of the growing inequality that threatens the harmony of our democracy far more than the alarmist cry of 'racial division.'

  Orlando Patterson

  Thinking, Class, Long

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