Certainty Quotes - Page 20

• OK, so this pack - tax package includes about 50 tax breaks. None of them are new. They were all existing tax breaks. What this did was make them permanent. It gives some certainty for people when they're filing taxes that they don't have to wonder if Congress is going to renew them year after year.

  Susan Davis

  Years, People, Giving

  "Here's What You Should Know About The $1.8 Trillion Spending Bill". "All Things Considered", www.npr.org. December 21, 2015.

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• General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.

  Brian Greene

  Challenges, Together, Excited

  "Professor Brian Greene answers everything you wanted to know about string theory and the multiverse". www.abc.net.au. February 26, 2016.

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• When we started, I was delivering meals to people in Atlanta. We were a direct-care organization. And it was - people needed meals, they needed transport, they needed medication, they needed buddy systems. They had a death sentence. There was AZT, and that was just prolonging the agony, basically. Now people, of course, if they are on antiretrovirals, they face a lifetime of health, basically. I mean, it doesn't - it's I would say in the 99 percent certainty bracket that if you are on that medication, you will have a healthy life.

  Elton John

  Mean, Atlanta, Agony

  "Elton John on AIDS: Compassion is Part of the Cure". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. July 24, 2012.

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• Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.

  Carl Andre

  Believe, Thinking, Forever

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Certain miracles that I beheld there have haunted my memory ever since: a gray April morning of sirocco, when the almond blossoms, the flaming tulips, the young green of the vines, hung as if painted on the motionless air; a summer night when the roses had an unearthly pallor under a half-eaten moon, whose ghostliness was somehow one with their perfume and with the phosphorescence of dew tipping their petals; a day when the trees stood part submerged in fog, into which leaves dropped slowly, slowly, one after another, and sank out of sight.

  Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

  Summer, Morning, Memories

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• There is a certain hidden mediocrity in those who are stationed above us in life, an ability to take liberties in their pursuit of pleasures and diversions, without injuring the honor and respect we owe to them.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Life, Respect, Honor

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• There is a certain imperiousness, in the manner of speaking and in actions, which makes itself felt everywhere, and soon wins attention and respect. This commanding quality is useful in all affairs, and even for obtaining what we ask for.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Respect, Winning, Quality

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• Place 5 percent to 10 percent of your total assets in gold bullion and selected gold and silver coins. No one knows with certainty whether the coming depression will be inflationary or deflationary.

  James Dale Davidson

  Gold, Coins, Silver

  James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg (1994). “The Great Reckoning: Protecting Yourself in the Coming Depression”, p.510, Simon and Schuster

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• I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Real, Writing, Decision

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• The risk of failure is a very personal thing. One of the quotes I like, I think this came from the famous basketball coach from California - John Wooden - is that, "Successful people - winners - do everything necessary to prepare to win, without the certainty of winning." Everybody would do everything necessary to prepare to win if winning was a certainty. So you're willing to put yourself out publicly and privately and say, "I'm going to do this."

  Les Wexner

  Basketball, Successful, Winning

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

  Stephen Colbert

  Country, People, Choices

  Source: tv.avclub.com

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• I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.

  Andrew O'Hagan

  Writing, Personality, Together

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• To a certain extent all philosophers have been involved in a systematic questioning that undermines confidence and certainty. Philosophy as a whole unleashed skeptical forces which, outside of the tightly controlled environment of a rigorous philosophical debate, led a lot of people to throw their hands up in despair and think 'what's the point?'. A lot of the public perception of philosophy is that it leaves you with no answers, and more confused than you were at the beginning.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Confused, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• What visual information does is it creates priorities. You cannot know with certainty what lies behind something else. There are very few transparent materials in the natural world or the built environment. And so we deal with things superficially, and we deal with what's in front of us, not what's behind our head that we can't see, or to the left or the right. Visualists are often linear and timeline-oriented, whereas the natural condition and the natural way of problem-solving throughout evolution is to be multitasking.

  Gordon Hempton

  Lying, Priorities, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's true that a dangerous combination of certainty and ignorance often shows up around sex and consent on campus. People on all sides of the issue have such strong feelings about it that they're blinded to the facts.

  Vanessa Grigoriadis

  Strong, Ignorance, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't care who you are, you're going to choke in certain matches. You get to a point where your legs don't move and you can't take a deep breath. You start to hit the ball about a yard wide, instead of inches.

  Arthur Ashe

  Art, Moving, Yards

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

  Geraldine Brooks

  People, Moral

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• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

  Albert Camus

  Birthday, Men, Age

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.57, Vintage

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• It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Regret, Heart, Hands

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• Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who's had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil.

  Joan Collins

  Discipline, Devil, Age

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• We continue to be exasperated by the view, apparently gaining momentum in certain circles, that armed robbery is okay as long as nobody gets hurt! The proper solution to armed robbery is a dead robber, on the scene.

  Jeff Cooper

  Hurt, Views, Circles

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• I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Order, Ontology

  Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp (1997). “The complete works of Marcel Duchamp”, Delano Greenridge Editions

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• I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. God is in everyone's life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else - God is in this person's life. You can - you must - try to seek God in every human life.

  Pope Francis

  Drug, Trying, Vices

  Pope Francis (2014). “My Door Is Always Open: A Conversation on Faith, Hope and the Church in a Time of Change”, p.99, A&C Black

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• Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I've learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Destiny, Looks, Amusement

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• I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Cancer, Long, People

  "Anderson Cooper 360°", transcripts.cnn.com. August 5, 2010.

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