Defective Quotes - Page 2

• Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.

  Aristotle

  Government, Tyrants, Justice

  Aristotle, (2016). “Aristotle's Politics: Writings from the Complete Works: Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens”, p.69, Princeton University Press

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• You should understand that private faith does not force public decisions. That's how you work at compromise. I haven't given up what I believe, but I live in community - in a city, state, nation, and world - with people who don't believe what I believe. That doesn't make them defective or inferior.

  Jeremiah Wright

  Believe, Cities, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Whatever strength the masses have is due entirely to ahimsa, however imperfect or defective its practice might have been.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Practice, Might, Imperfect

  Mahatma Gandhi (1993). “Gandhi on Nehru”

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• Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license.

  Confucius

  Character, Men, Practice

  Confucius (2016). “Delphi Collected Works of Confucius - Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism (Illustrated)”, p.28, Delphi Classics

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• I cannot accept this invitation [to celebrate the bicentenial of the Constitution], for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention... To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]

  Thurgood Marshall

  Believe, Government, Philadelphia

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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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• Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Art, Hard Work, Science

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.111, Indiana University Press

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• I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Wise, Smart, School

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• You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

  David Mitchell

  Healing, Mean, Resilience

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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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• 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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• 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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• I must congratulate myself, in passing, for never having lost the ability to examine my conscience, never having lost the gift of finding myself wanting & defective. Why fear the criticism of others when you, yourself, are first out of the critical gate? If self-denigration is the race I am the winner, even before the starting gun. Collect the bets.

  Frank McCourt

  Gun, Race, Self

  Frank McCourt (2005). “Teacher Man: A Memoir”, p.318, Simon and Schuster

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• and another claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.

  Jodi Picoult

  Children, Grief, Heart

  Jodi Picoult (2008). “Change of Heart: A Novel”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

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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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• A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Fashion, Laughter

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• A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.

  Toni Morrison

  Sunshine, Orange Trees, Sky

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Tar Baby”, New Amer Library

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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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• 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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• Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external aid.

  Michel de Montaigne

  World, Incredibles, Aids

  Michel de Montaigne (1965). “Complete Essays”, p.166, Stanford University Press

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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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