Defective Quotes

• The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions.

  Clarence Darrow

  Men, Intelligent, Abnormal

  Clarence Darrow (2015). “Crime: Its Cause and Treatment”, p.162, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Sex, Powerful, Perfect

  St Thomas Aquinas (2013). “Summa Theologica, Volume 1”, p.466, Cosimo, Inc.

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• What does it say about us that people who are considered defective are instinctively caring and compassionate?

  Morley Safer

  Caring, People, Doe

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• Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

  P. D. James

  Kindness, May, Firsts

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.416, Vintage

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• Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective

  Bertrand Russell

  Opinion, Sterilization, Should

  Bertrand Russell (1971). “Bertrand Russell's best: silhouettes in satire”, Allen & Unwin

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• Man is flawed; universe is imperfect; the functioning of the cosmos is defective! Everything seems to be severely punished by the imperfection! May be the real challenge of men is to correct all these flaws! It is possible to think that God is an evolutionary perfectionist! He creates things as unimportant and faulty; then let them all alone and fateless to evolve to perfection!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Real, Men, Thinking

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• Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.

  Peter Singer

  Sometimes, Killing, Infant

  "Practical Ethics". Book by Peter Singer, 1979.

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• A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.

  Thomas Nagel

  Motivation, Psychology, Behaviour

  Thomas Nagel (2016). “The Possibility of Altruism”, p.34, Princeton University Press

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• The defective can be more than the entire.

  Thomas Hardy

  Whole

  "Tess of the D'Urbervilles".

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• ...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

  Thomas Hardy

  Distance, Hands, Suffering

  Thomas Hardy (1995). “Thomas Hardy: Three Great Novels”, JG Press

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• With the rise of industrialism, words like 'normal' and 'defective,' words that had once only been used to refer to things, began to be used to refer to people. ... In the industrial age, a new degree of uniformity was expected of people. The rhythms and pacing of life could no longer be organic. People became expected to function like things.

  Anne Finger

  People, Age, Degrees

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• These are the six ways of courting defeat - neglect to estimate the enemy's strength; want of authority; defective training; unjustifiable anger; nonobservance of discipline; failure to use picked men.

  Sun Tzu

  Art, War, Men

  Sun-tzu, Hagopian Institute (2008). “Art of War, Plain English Edition: One of the Greatest Strategy Books in the History of the World, Now in an Easy to Read Version”, p.64, Hagopian Institute

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• The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Book, Men

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• It is alleged by men of loose principles , or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political station. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of immorality , he abuses his civic responsibilty. He sacrifices not only his own interest but that of his neighbor, and he betrays the interest of his country.

  Noah Webster

  Country, Religious, Sacrifice

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• To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Nature, Science, Intelligent

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• This is a precious possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient ... It is the duty of society to protect the physicians from such requests.

  Margaret Mead

  Children, Cancer, Sleep

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• Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore she is unsure in herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil. ... Thus in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good.

  Albertus Magnus

  Nature, Clever, Women

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• The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Lame, Study, Results

  Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cicero (2006). “De Officiis Or on Duties on Obligations”, p.120, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

  James Wolcott

  Running, Team, Character

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• I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Sleep, Night, Drug

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Character, Mean, Government

  Calvin Coolidge (1924). “Calvin Coolidge, His Ideals of Citizenship as Revealed Through His Speeches and Writings”

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• Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.

  Eric Schlosser

  Softball, Animal, Government

  Eric Schlosser (2001). “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”, p.196, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.

  Florence King

  Sick, Dating, Crippled

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• It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

  Zadie Smith

  Odds, Mountain, Matter

  Zadie Smith (2003). “White Teeth”, p.278, Vintage

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• What I really want is to sit next to someone under an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don't want some rusty '73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when it's rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?

  Augusten Burroughs

  Beach, Coffee, Fall

  "Dry: A Memoir". Book by Augusten Burroughs, June, 2003.

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