Dubious Quotes - Page 3

• I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

  Paul Klee

  Color, Drawing, Use

  Paul Klee, Felix Klee (1968). “The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918”, p.141, Univ of California Press

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• Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Taken, Thinking

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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• For many, the regressive belief in superstitions and miracles is an escape from the hardships of life. Once trapped into irrationalism, they become more incapable of mastering reality. It is a vicious circle, like an addiction. They become vulnerable to exploitation by astrologers, godmen, dubious pseudo-psychologists, corrupt politicians and the whole mega-industry of irrationalism.

  Sanal Edamaruku

  Reality, Circles, Addiction

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• I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Book, Theory Of Evolution, Incredibles

  "Legalism and the Sins of the Church" by L. Roger Sockwell, Xulon Press, (p. 30, 2002.

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• Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

  George Eliot

  Memories, Butterfly, Expectations

  George Eliot (1859). “Adam Bede”, p.115, London

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• From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.

  Justina Chen

  Heart, Ideas, Leaving

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• I kissed her," he explained, aggrieved. "Mmm, yes, I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing that, ah-hem, overly public occurrence." Lyall sharpened his pen nib, using a small copper blade that ejected from the end of his glassicals. "Well! Why hasn't she done anything about it?" the Alpha wanted to know. "You mean like whack you upside the noggin with that deadly parasol of hers? I would be cautious in that area if I were you.

  Gail Carriger

  Mean, Would Be, Done

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• Heroes only come in three kinds:dead, damaged or dubious.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Hero, Three, Kind

  Gregory David Roberts (2004). “Shantaram: A Novel”, p.773, Macmillan

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• The idea that Hezbollah is acting as an agent of Iran is very dubious. It's not accepted by specialists on Iran or specialists on Hezbollah. But it's the party line. Or sometimes you can put in Syria, i.e. "Syrian-supported Hezbollah," but since Syria is of less interest now you have to emphasize Iranian support.

  Noam Chomsky

  Party, Iran, Ideas

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.

  Ben Hecht

  Numbers, Lust, Juan

  Ben Hecht (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet

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• To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ideas, World

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• Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.

  Colin McGinn

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Writing

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• All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Art, Philosophy, Past

  "The Sleepwalkeers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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• Wholeness is sort of a dubious concept. Because in terms of the human body and literal wholeness and structures, you think: "here are the structures that help make me whole." Family, or school, or the city I live in. When those structures are dysfunctional or decaying, you end up kind of Frankensteining pieces from everywhere in order to make yourself sated and comfortable and alive.

  Carrie Brownstein

  School, Thinking, Order

  "Carrie Brownstein Discusses Her Memoir". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. October 27, 2015.

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• All obvious moves look dubious in analysis after the game.

  Viktor Korchnoi

  Moving, Games, Analysis

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• So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary.

  Albert Hadley

  Past, Vocabulary, Design

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• I strongly believe the black culture spends too much time, energy and effort raising, praising, and teasing our black children about the dubious glories of professional sports.

  Arthur Ashe

  Sports, Time, Children

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• There is absolutely no reason to suspect that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to recognize their out-of-state marriages will cause same-sex couples to raise fewer children or impel married opposite-sex couples to raise more children. The Virginia Marriage Laws therefore do not further Virginia's interest in channeling children into optimal families, even if we were to accept the dubious proposition that same-sex couples are less capable parents.

  Henry Franklin Floyd

  Sex, Couple, Children

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• I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one's right to privacy.

  Harry Leslie Smith

  War, Iraq, Veteran

  "This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time" by Harry Leslie Smith, www.theguardian.com. November 8, 2013.

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• Despite the dubious statistics … democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting.

  Rory Stewart

  Fighting, Democracy, Statistics

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• And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We won't know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there's a lot of work to be done.

  Adam Parfrey

  Play, Names, Dumb

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• My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.

  Robert M. Price

  Cheerleading, Emotional, Wind

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• For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

  Seth Lloyd

  Sex, Moving, Dna

  "Move Aside, Sex". The Edge Annual Question — 2010: "How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?", www.edge.org. 2010.

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• I can be fairly optimistic, but I'm probably more a realist, I think. I mean, optimism's an interesting quality, isn't it, because I'm always slightly dubious as to what's behind it?

  Guy Pearce

  Optimistic, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

  William James

  Lonely, Men, Needs

  William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.72, Harvard University Press

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