Dictation Quotes

• If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write

  Tommy Shaw

  Writing, Ideas, Lazy

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• When once you consider an action, do not let anything dissuade you. Consult your heart, not others, and then follow its dictates.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Heart, Action

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.4660, Manonmani Publishers

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• I would love to employ a man, but how can I possibly give a man dictation from the bath?

  Barbara Cartland

  Men, Giving, Baths

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• Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

  Charlotte Bronte

  Strong, Real, Struggle

  Charlotte Brontë “Jane Eyre”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Nail polish or false eyelashes isn't politics. If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don't take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged lady. My politics don't depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Pigs, Eyelashes, Style

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• [The married woman is] is a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, and serves her master's passion; [and] who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Pregnancy, Passion, Names

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• I did not write it (Uncle Tom's Cabin). God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Uncles, Inspiration, Writing

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• Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.

  Steven Pressfield

  Artist, Modest, Knows

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.127, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

  Andre Breton

  Real, Independent, Writing

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• If I want to be free from any other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.

  William Graham Sumner

  Wisdom, Men, Want

  William Graham Sumner (1919). “The Forgotten Man: And Other Essays”

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• ... the place where [adults] pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

  Bob Black

  Order, Giving, Police

  Bob Black (1986). “The Abolition of Work and Other Essays”, Loompanics Unltd

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• I'm moving to a point that I'm fed up with the N.C.A.A. dictation.

  Brian Bosworth

  Moving, Feds, Fed Up

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• Sometimes the impressions are just general feelings. Sometimes the direction comes so clearly and so unmistakably that it can be written down like spiritual dictation.

  Richard G. Scott

  Spiritual, Feelings, Sometimes

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• Being creative is not so much the desire  to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.

  Anni Albers

  Art, Creativity, Creative

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• One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Philosophy, Issues, Way

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• I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Writing, Made

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• Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.

  James Buchan

  Fall, Oil, Middle East

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• the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Might, Lasts, Ends

  Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1960.

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• If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

  Gertrude Stein

  Creation, Ifs

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• Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Writing, Hands

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• You should not be carried away by the dictation of the mind, but the mind should be carried by your dictation.

  A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

  Inspiration, Practice, Meditation

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• I have a feeling that art is something you do for yourself, and that any time you turn your decisions over to someone else you're postponing at best, your own development. The atmosphere of the workshop should be that of trying out one's own work and accepting the signals from others but not accepting the dictation of others because that is a violation of the spirit of art. Art can't be done by somebody else, it has got to be done by the artist.

  William Stafford

  Art, Teaching, Decision

  William Stafford, Paul Merchant, Vincent Wixon (2003). “The answers are inside the mountains: meditations on the writing life”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Listening, Might

  Ayn Rand (2000). “The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers”, p.74, Penguin

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• Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.

  John Dewey

  Teacher, Teaching, Mind

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.83, 谷月社

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• One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Self, Definitions, Information

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.16, Routledge

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