Dispassionate Quotes - Page 2

• Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Fashion, Block, Character

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• Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.

  Bart D. Ehrman

  Jesus, Eye, Agendas

  Bart D. Ehrman (2012). “Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth”, p.7, Harper Collins

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• My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

  Koren Zailckas

  Queens, Ex Boyfriend, My Boyfriend

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• It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the states the right to maintain a designated "Militia." Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that.

  Antonin Scalia

  Gun, Rights, People

  Antonin Scalia (1998). “A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law”, p.137, Princeton University Press

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• The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

  Paul Di Filippo

  Emotional, Hot, Tone

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• Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Wise, Block, Men

  Walter Savage Landor (1824). “Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen: Richard I and the Abbot of Boxley. The Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney. King Henry IV and Sir Arnold Savage. Southey and Porson. Oliver Cromwel and Walter Noble. Aeschines and Phocion. Queen Elizabeth and Cecil. King James I and Isaac Casaubon. Marchese Pallavicini and Walter Landor. General Kleber and some French officers. Bonaparte and the president of the senate. Bishop Burnet and Humphrey Hardcastle. Peter Leopold and the President Du”, p.62

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• Science is not neutral in its judgments, nor dispassionate, nor detached.

  Kim Chernin

  Science, Judgment, Detached

  Kim Chernin (1982). “The obsession: reflections on the tyranny of slenderness”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.

  John Dos Passos

  Effort, Political, Competition

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• the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

  Beryl Markham

  Men, Hands, Mind

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.157, Open Road Media

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• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Men, Discovery

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• The image of the disinterested, dispassionate scientist is no less false than that of the mad scientist who is willing to destroy the world for knowledge.

  Lewis Wolpert

  Mad, World, Scientist

  Lewis Wolpert (1998). “The Unnatural Nature of Science”, p.92, Harvard University Press

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• We 'rid ourselves of conceptual thought' when, by persistent observation, we recognize the unreality of our self-centered thoughts. Then we can remain dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by them. That does not mean to be a cold person. Rather, it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances.

  Joko Beck

  Mean, Self, Doe

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• The step that a lot of people miss is a dispassionate evaluation of the reasons [for rejection]. If you can dispassionately evaluate the reasons for rejection and find them with merit, you can address them; if without merit, you can ignore them.

  Brian Koppelman

  People, Rejection, Missing

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• It applies in any business. Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys. With the advice and support of their bean counters, absolutely, but with the final word going to those who live and breathe the customer experience. Passion and drive for excellence will win over the computer-like, dispassionate, analysis-driven philosophy every time.

  Bob Lutz

  Running, Philosophy, Passion

  Bob Lutz (2011). “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business”, p.8, Penguin

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• God, Who is by nature good and dispassionate, loves all men equally as His handiwork. But He glorifies the virtuous man because in his will he is united to God. At the same time, in His goodness he is merciful to the sinner and by chastising him in this life brings him back to the path of virtue. Similarly, a man of good and dispassionate judgment also loves all men equally. He loves the virtuous man because of his nature and the probity of his intention; and he loves the sinner, too, because of his nature and because in his compassion he pities him for foolishly stumbling in darkness.

  Maximus the Confessor

  Christian, Men, Compassion

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• In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

  Ian Mcewan

  Feelings, Shrinking, Moments

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• If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

  Henri Matisse

  Happiness, Light, People

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.11, Univ of California Press

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• The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men.

  Joseph Conrad

  Believe, Heart, Fate

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.89, Cambridge University Press

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• At the individual level Swaraj is vitally connected with the capacity for dispassionate self-assessment , ceaseless self purification and growing self-reliance.... It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Assessment, Self, Growing

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• I do not think science has to make any apologies. It looks at the world and tells it like it is. And we all live longer, better lives because of this dispassionate view. Sure, it commands awe and provides inspiration. Still, I would rather be operated on by a surgeon who sees me as an assemblage of atoms than one who lovingly tries to manipulate what he or she imagines are my vital energy fields.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Inspiration, Apology, Thinking

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• God belongs to all free beings. He is the life of all, the salvation of all ~faithful and unfaithful, just and unjust, pious and impious, passionate and dispassionate, monks and laymen, wise and simple, healthy and sick, young and old just as the effusion of light, the sight of the sun, and the changes of the seasons are for all alike; 'for there is no respect of persons with God.'

  John Climacus

  Wise, Christian, Simple

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• Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

  Lord Acton

  Politics, Politician, Crime

  John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom (and other Essays)”, p.61, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Real, Reflection, Expression

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• In a perfect world, probably we'd never yell, we'd just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Children, Perfect, World

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• They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.

  George Will

  Baseball, Islands, Umpires

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