Fierce Quotes - Page 15

• There won't be any revolution in America ... the people are too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can't feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom.

  Eric Linklater

  America, People, Insulting

  'Juan in America' (1931) bk. 5, pt. 3

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• The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Art, Dumb, Heroism

  Gretel Ehrlich (1986). “The Solace of Open Spaces”, Penguin Group USA

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• The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Important, Legends, Beast

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.

  Aaron Allston

  Firsts, Lawyer, Refuge

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• Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

  William J. Brennan

  Pain, Punishment, Purpose

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• There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

  John Keats

  Failure, Literature, Hell

  Endymion preface (1818)

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• Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

  Michael Ignatieff

  Memories, Trying, Shapes

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• There's such a fierce intense fire burning inside of me, so much that it just wants to explode.

  GG Allin

  Fire, Burning, Want

  "The Jane Whitney Show", July 16, 1993.

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• As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  War, Source, Communicate

  Muriel Rukeyser, Janet E. Kaufman, Anne F. Herzog, Jan Heller Levi (2005). “The collected poems of Muriel Rukeyser”, Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

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• People I look to: again, Hank Aaron, man you challenged the status quo and the records of the game. Monumental feats in an era where people didn't like that.

  Dave Winfield

  Sports, Men, Games

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• I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Writing, Wife, Mind

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• My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said, 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well.

  Roger Waters

  Mother, Father, Eye

  "Back To The Wall: Rolling Stone's 2010 Profile of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters". Interview with Brian Hiatt, www.rollingstone.com. October 06, 2011.

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• Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

  Peter Thiel

  Smart, School, Careers

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.31, Crown Business

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• In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Impact, Western Culture, Half

  Chen Ning Yang (2005). “Selected Papers, 1945-1980, with Commentary”, p.247, World Scientific

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• Soon will set in the fitful weather, with fierce gales and sullen skies and frosty air, and it will be time to tuck up safely my roses and lillies and the rest for their winter sleep beneath the snow, where I never forget them, but ever dream of their wakening in happy summers yet to be.

  Celia Thaxter

  Summer, Dream, Sleep

  Celia Thaxter (1894). “An Island Garden”

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• I wanted to play in New York when I was in my prime and I was young, fierce, lock-down [defender]. Madison Square Garden, that would have been sick. But right now, China is way more adventurous for me.

  Metta World Peace

  New York, Garden, Squares

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• What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Powerful, Men, Lions

  Iyanla Vanzant (2010). “Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through”, p.18, Hay House, Inc

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• Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Competition, Atheism, Moral

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The Last Fruit Off an Old Tree”, p.96

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• Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments

  Tina Brown

  Mistake, Psychics, Punishment

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• Strength of will - is essential to your survival and success. The competitor who won't go away, who won't stay down, has one of the most formidable competitive advantages of all. In evaluating people, I prize ego. It often translates into a fierce desire to do their best and an inner confidence that stands them in good stead when things really get rough. Psychologists suggest that there is a strong link between ego and competitiveness. All the great performers I've ever coached had ego to spare.

  Bill Walsh

  Strong, People, Ego

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• It seems proper, at all events, that by an early enactment similar to that of other countries the application of public money by an officer of Government to private uses should be made a felony and visited with severe and ignominious punishment.

  Martin Van Buren

  Country, Government, Punishment

  United States. President (1837-1841 : Van Buren), Martin Van Buren (1838). “Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress: At the Commencement of the Third Session of the Twenty-fifth Congress”, p.11

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• It takes a fierce devotion to defend your artistic space, and eternal vigilance over it, because the needs of others will grow like vines in your little plot and claim it back for the jungle.

  Judith Ortiz Cofer

  Space, Plot, Needs

  Judith Ortiz Cofer (2000). “Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer”, p.88, University of Georgia Press

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• As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Boys, Violence

  "Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity". Book by Frank Pittman (Chapter 5), 1993.

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• There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

  John Darnielle

  Ideas, Firsts

  John Darnielle (2014). “Wolf in White Van: A Novel”, p.22, Macmillan

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• Many Buddhist teachers have described compassion as the ability to react freely and accurately in any situation. Being nice or feeling sorry for someone may be called for, but so may being fierce and unyielding. When sweetness is applied indiscriminately, it is seen as 'idiot compassion.'

  Issan Dorsey

  Teacher, Buddhist, Sorry

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