Breaking Down Quotes - Page 4

• Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Believe, Civilization, Ifs And

  Arnold J. Toynbee (1949). “Civilization on Trial”

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• Everything was so designed by Hannibal to break down Will in the first season, until Will's sanity became questionable. It's so much easier to believe that somebody losing their mind is capable of terrible things than it is to consider Frasier Crane, a charming, fun doctor who invites you to dinner. If you put those two in a police lineup, you're going to pick the guy who's melting down.

  Bryan Fuller

  Fun, Believe, Two

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.

  Todd Haynes

  Gay, Interesting, Eras

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• You have to exercise, or at some point you'll just break down.

  Barack Obama

  Exercise, Presidential, Healthy

  "Work Like Obama: Management Secrets From The World’s Toughest Job" by Ryan Coonerty, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 20, 2017.

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• What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind.

  Robert Grudin

  Love, Jobs, Thinking

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• I think the better the show usually it means that you've got a lot of good people, because it's sustaining itself. If there's negative energy, things tend to break down ultimately.

  Peter Jacobson

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The dance is the mother of the arts, The dance breaks down the distinction of body & soul.

  Curt Sachs

  Dance, Mother, Art

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• Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

  Elliott Colla

  Black And White, Division, Noir

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As competitive as I am, I want to get the best of a play and make sure to use it's full potential even when things break down. But sometimes you need to just say 'uncle' and let it go and avoid a hit

  Mark Sanchez

  Uncles, Play, Let It Go

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• Over the decades, you got various companies involved in making escalators and you've got Metro varying between internal repair crews and contractors. They're dealing with old equipment, which of course is prone to break down, and the repair crews don't even know what's busted or who made the busted parts till they tear the things open. Then sometimes they have to go back to the shop and manufacture parts, because the original maker has gone out of business.

  Robert James Thomson

  Tears, Gone, Down And

  "Dr. Gridlock". The Washington Post Live Chat, live.washingtonpost.com. January 4, 2016.

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• A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.

  Adolf Hitler

  Strong, Race, Giving

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• The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.

  Daniel Henninger

  What If, May, Internet

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• I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

  Lev Grossman

  Giving, Wonderful, Excited

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• Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision.

  Karen Armstrong

  Mean, Compassion, Perspective

  Karen Armstrong (2010). “The Spiral Staircase”, p.331, Vintage Canada

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• When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Real, Gaps, Ideals

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.20, Random House

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• There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Horse, Passion, Vanity

  Gustave Flaubert (1993). “Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life”, Everyman's Library

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• There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting. It just seems like that element of trying to move forward while things are breaking down... Obviously, it's always been the backdrop for a lot of great literature and great cinematic characters, but aside from that, I'm just drawn to it because that feels honest to me.

  Greg Kinnear

  Moving, Struggle, Character

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• once you laugh at you own weaknesses, you can move forward. Comedy breaks down walls. It opens up people. If you're good, you can fill up those openings with something positive. Mabye........ combat some the ugliness in the world.

  Goldie Hawn

  Motivational, Wall, Moving

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• Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Love Is, Way, Ships

  D. H. Lawrence (2016). “Kangaroo”, p.201, Jester House Publishing

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• At moments when life is at its worst there are two things you can do: 1.) break down,lose hope and refuse to go on while lying face down on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2.) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Lying, Two, Laughing

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• Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

  Iain Banks

  Lonely, Night, Car

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• Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

  Jodi Picoult

  Children, Decision, Parent

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel”, p.112, Simon and Schuster

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• I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

  May Sarton

  Innocent Person, Machines, Faces

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• No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Sweet, Reflection, Past

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.261, Penguin

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• Even if all the clocks in the station break down, thought Hugo, time won't stop. Not even if you really want it to. Like now.

  Brian Selznick

  Want, Clock, Stations

  Brian Selznick (2015). “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”, p.375, Scholastic Inc.

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