Desirability Quotes

• If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Wish, Liberty, Essentials

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by F.A. Hayek, Chap. 6: "Equality, Value and Merit," Routledge (p. 77), 1960.

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• Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

  Tom Stoppard

  Believe, Wells, Optimal

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• Truth - An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Funny, Truth, Appearance

  Ambrose Bierce (2011). “Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs”, p.825, Library of America

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• Truth is like the stars; it does not appear except from behind obscurity of the night. Truth is like all beautiful things in the world; it does not disclose its desirability except to those who first feel the influence of falsehood. Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.

  Khalil Gibran

  Beautiful, Stars, Truth

  Khalil Gibran “Khalil The Heretic”, Library of Alexandria

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• Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.

  Caroline Knapp

  Self Esteem, Risk, Size

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• Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake.

  Thomas Merton

  Love Is, Doe, Sake

  Thomas Merton (1974). “A Thomas Merton Reader”, Image

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• Culture and society determined sexual desirability as what makes us important so long that it's part of our sensibility from birth.Little girls know. From around 2 or 3, the pretty ones already know how and why they get attention. And how quickly they learn to play it. Use it. And how quickly the rest of us figure out we don't have it.

  Cris Mazza

  Girl, Play, Long

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• A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.

  Helen Fisher

  Car, Guy, Watches

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• Maybe that will happen with other countries as well. And so, that's why one of the things that groups like mine that work for the elimination of nuclear weapons and work for their marginalization in the meantime, we say you have to diminish the political value that's attached to nuclear weapons in order to give them less (kind of) desirability in the eyes of governments that do not now have them, and thus to help stop their spread.

  John Burroughs

  Country, Eye, Government

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• If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.

  Max Horkheimer

  Thinking, Views, Goal

  "Eclipse of Reason" by Max Horkheimer, (pp. 7-8), 1947.

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• A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
  feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

  Susan Sontag

  Distance, Past, Fire

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.17, Macmillan

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• What's amazing to me is how many of the issues facing women in the ancient world still linger today. Take Odysseus' wife, Penelope, a brilliant, resourceful woman who ends up in a terrible situation: in her husband's absence, she is being held hostage in her own home by men who claim to be courting her. She tries to make them leave, but because she's a woman they refuse, blaming their bad behavior on her desirability.

  Madeline Miller

  Husband, Home, Men

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• I think a certain kind of sexism is so matter-of-fact, and has been for so long, that young women feel less valuable or second-tier if their gender and attractiveness or sexual desirability are not being commented on in the workplace.

  Cris Mazza

  Thinking, Long, Facts

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• Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

  Anne Carson

  Love, Pain, Moving

  Anne Carson (2014). “Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay”, p.30, Princeton University Press

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• Women's greater social desirability and beauty power afford opportunities for creating both measurable and invisible income. While the opportunities are available to almost all women and some men, they are available in abundance to the genetic celebrity ... a woman so beautiful that men do more than look and talk--they follow her.

  Warren Farrell

  Beautiful, Opportunity, Men

  Warren Farrell (2005). “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap--and what Women Can Do about it”, p.191, AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn

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• Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.

  Neil Postman

  Mistake, Believe, Political

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• I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders. But what about the injunctions of the Koran and Hadis? The leaders cannot over-ride them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope your learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty.

  Lala Lajpat Rai

  Wise, Believe, Leader

  Presidential address by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Muslim League in Lahore, www.columbia.edu. 1940.

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• EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.

  Richard Stallman

  Learning, Sight, Editors

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• Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Loyalty, Commitment, Desire

  Zygmunt Bauman (2013). “Globalization: The Human Consequences”, p.56, John Wiley & Sons

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• To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Rewards, Privilege, Merit

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• As the tall dark and handsome male star, Carey Grant always stands for male beauty and desirability, whether in a 30s screwball, a 40s film noir, or a 50s romantic comedy. He consequently turns around the orthodox gender between the one who looks and so desires, and the one who is looked at, and so is being desired.

  Steven A. Cohen

  Beauty, Stars, Dark

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• An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Time, Truth, Philosophy

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.226, 谷月社

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• I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.

  Toni Morrison

  Desire, Made

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